Learning to code is not easy
Tags: coding, programming
Published: 2019-10-21 07:11:47

Coding is easy. Right? No. Wrong. Coding is very hard. Coding is not following a tutorial, or copy-pasting code from StackOverflow as much as making music is not strumming a few chords and humming along. Coding is an intricate process of identifying a problem and breaking it down into small parts that you can solve in the most efficient way using programming logic.


<b>But that 4-week Coding Course says it is easy</b>
The major reason why we all now think programming is easy is the advent of coding courses and bootcamps that are sold to us by marketing geniuses. We have all seen the ads; “I did XYZ coding course and in 3 months I built my first website.” That is far from being true. If you constantly run into online ads telling you that coding is easy, all you have to do is pay a subscription fee and receive all the knowledge you need to become a master ~builder~ programmer then you will gobble up that lie. After spending a few hundred dollars on different coding courses and going to a few bootcamps, you will have the knowledge of how the syntax is supposed to be, you know some of the basic functions and concepts of a language. But then you have no idea what you can do, you have no idea how you can approach a problem.

All this marketing, coupled with the stories of Mark Zuckerberg coding Facebook in his dorm room and we have a lot of people running around thinking they can camp in their bedrooms for a few weeks and become millionaires. This is a very poisonous attitude that is leading to a lot of people wasting their time investing in goals they may never achieve.


<b>Okay I’ll follow the video tutorial</b>
We have all tried to follow a tutorial on how to make a simple app and got lost along the line somewhere. The experienced programmer taking you through the tutorial tells you to simply integrate the API into your project and hit build. Next thing you know you are online trying to solve that obscure error that has only 4,000 hits on Google search results and no answer on most forums you visit.

This is another side of the coin, the experienced programmers who have forgotten how hard it is to learn to code. They have become so seasoned and to them it’s become intuition to look at a problem, spit out a few lines of code and voila, the magic happens.


<b>Well I have StackOverflow</b>
SO is not a haven of coding solutions that you just go to and copy-paste code samples from into your project. No two coding projects are the same and in the same manner, you will rarely find the perfect lines of code that you need to Cmd+C/Cmd+V (Mac User, sorry Windows) into your project. Oftentimes the solution to a similar problem you find on SO will need you to understand the Ops problem, find a way how that relates to yours and adapt their solution to fit your problem.


<b>I am not paying some person 100 bucks an hour to sit behind a computer</b>
Most business owners tend to be hesitant when it comes to spending money for what they do not understand. Hiring a coder is one of them. I will also put photography here as well, your nephew even with a 1,000-dollar camera does not come anywhere near what a professional photographer can do with a much cheaper camera. The best way to get business owners to understand that they need to spend the money on a programmer and not try to learn programming themselves is to use the surgeon example. Whenever someone is not feeling well, they do not take a course in brain surgery and then prescribe themselves meds. No, they go to their surgeon who will charge them 200 bucks just to talk to them and write some inaudible jargon on a piece of paper.

In the same manner, if your business needs an app or a website, please do the sane thing and hire a qualified and proven professional to do the job and pay them what they demand.


If you are picking up programming and really feel this is for you, stay vigilant and keep your fingers on that keyboard; if you are a business owner and think you can learn to code and build the app your company needs, please hire a professional.