I started coding early in 2019 by using Udemy as my primary learning source but I wasn't satisfied with the way the classes were taught because I felt like I was just copying the facilitator. SO! I switched over to Codecademy. It was great for a while but I also didn't feel challenged. Thus I was brought over to Freecodecamp which I presume might be much of the same, but I'm worried I'll have the same problem. It's as if some of the information just doesn't... stick?
I seriously enjoy coding but some days it just takes too much to continue with lessons. Am I the only one?
Top comments (6)
I think the problem is that it's very easy to read the lesson, solve the exercise and move on to the next one without internalising anything. Active learning will help: ask yourself "What do I need to remember from this?", write down your own notes, make drawings if it helps, make the content yours.
You don't need to remember everything. When presented with a new function, you don't need to remember the parameters but it would help you in the future to know what it's called and what it does, so you can look it up.
In any case I believe that those lessons are just the first step. What you need to become a programmer is to write your own code. Your programs don't have to be complicated or long, but you need to define what you want to happen and then write the code. Going through the problem solving is what is going to make things stick.
If you don't know what to program, there are many websites where you can practice coding. I was on CodeWars for a bit, they have exercises ranked from 8 kyu (beginner) to 1 kyu (expert).
The projects are what I like most about freeCodeCamp. Don't feel that you have to wade through all the lessons before you try them. You might not be able to do a whole project up front but switching between lessons and working on a project will break the monotony, not to mention allow you to apply what you've learned. And go on the forum, it's full of people who are going through the same thing and it's a great way to get unstuck.
+1 for sure for writing notes. It doesn't work for everyone, but some people do have a better time passively integrating what they write into their memory.
Your ultimate goal should be to start transitioning away from tutorials, where you're solving other peoples' problems, to solving your own.
Your tutorials should focus on introducing you to techniques and processes so you can pull them out of your toolkit when needed.
These are things like:
Once you feel like you have a reasonable foundation, and your tutorials stop giving you "oh cool" moments, then you should pick a basic application to build yourself.
Common options for this include:
You would then look to build it yourself not through a tutorial, but by assembling and applying the lessons learned from those tutorials. When you run into troubles, simply use Google to guide you:
"how to save data to localstorage?".
At this point, congratulations! You're a developer. All we do all day every day is run Google searches and apply lessons learned :). But shhh, don't tell anyone.
Programming is just like any other language. Once you understand what your nouns, and verbs, etc are, you just need to start building sentences.
Good luck!
I sincerely believe that you are not the only one. The thing that helped me to maximize the learning process from video tutorials was that after I complete one series, I would just try to do the same app from the tutorial by myself. Without watching the videos for help when I got stuck. With this method, I was able to dirty my hands and dig more into the code by myself and understand the concepts better.
To clarify, I want to give an example. Let's say the video tutorial that you are watching is teaching how to make a to-do app. In this to-do app, let's say you are adding new task by clicking a button and reorganize their order by clicking a button called "Move Up" or "Move Down". After you finished the tutorial, try to make the same to-do app but to reorganize the task, the user should drags the tasks around.
tl;dr: Get your hands dirty and search for solutions when you got stuck rather than sticking with the tutorial.
Hope it helps :)
I think that you are at a point where you don't really need to do tutorials anymore. You might benefit from approaching learning from different direction. Start by having a problem to solve, a question in your mind. Also you might benefit from so called Feynman Technique(look it up). But my basic point is: learn while doing some hobby projects, exercises.
youtube.com/watch?v=g_aMpyMvQ9k , hopefully that youtube video helps