The four phases of the typical journey into coding
- The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
- The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it’s a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can’t actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
- The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you’re frequently going in circles and you’re starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the “Mirages of Mania”, like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
- The Upswing of Awesome is when you’ve finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you’ve mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you’re terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don’t know how to get to “production ready” code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?
Which phase are you in?
5?
Also 5. I made it to the point i can engineer basically anything, not just “write code”. If only someone would recognize that and hire me.
I’m at the point where I think I can engineer anything. But I also know that it takes effort and I ain’t gonna do that unless there’s a paycheck.
Unless its for myself or my family I ant gonna do it :D
I think in retirement, my goal will be to step back from the keyboard and go fishing/gardening or something. Unless I get the itch to do coding, Im not going to do it.
(Same)
Same, there’s always more to learn but I guess part of being at the point where you can engineer anything is that learning new stuff is just part of the process and not a big deal. Like you can ask me to program literally anything and I’ll fiqure out all the stuff I dont know on my own
Yeah, definitely higher than 4. The way that scale progresses, I think I’m at like an 8, maybe 10.