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I was talking with a friend who’s learning to code the other day, and the subject of the wall came up. Not the one that keeps the wildlings out, the one everybody slams into when they’re learning to code. Learning to code starts out great, there are so many tutorials that break things down really clearly, but once you’ve got a handle on the basics and want to move on to building your own projects, that’s where you hit the wall. It’s a huge leap from following tutorials where all the hard decisions are made for you to building your own projects with no one standing by to tell you where to start or what database to use or what your UI should look like.

The single thing I most want you all to know is that hitting the wall is normal. It happens to everyone. It absolutely does not mean that you’re dumb or not meant to be a programmer or that you’ll never get over the wall.

As a bit of an aside, I think the number of beginners who hit the wall and assume they’re just not smart enough to be programmers says more about how bad we collectively are at teaching programming than about the intelligence of anyone who hit the wall and walked away. I’m suspicious there’s a connection between how easy it is to write total beginner tutorials and how many of them there are, and how much harder it is to teach people to break down a problem and how few tutorials there are for that.

But anyway, I have some ideas for people who have hit the wall or who can see it in the distance and are getting worried.

One of the coolest things about programming is how many open source projects there are. Find one that you like and take it apart to see how it works. Search for text from the UI in the code and see if you can change it. Throw log messages all over the place to make the code show you what it’s doing. See if you can find some constants in there you can mess with. And don’t feel left out if you want to make games, those can be open source too.

Once you’ve found a project you like and have some idea how it works, see if you can change how it works. Let’s say you found a simple todo list app. Can you add due dates to your list items? Or subtasks? Could it play a sound and/or an animation to congratulate you when you check something off? Could you add a new feature like recurring tasks or email reminders? If you don’t have an open source app handy, just take a tutorial and mess with that.

Speaking of tutorials, if you do enough of them you’re going to start seeing similarities. Most apps have some sort of UI, some sort of data model, maybe a way to save that data for the next time you open the app (that’s pretty advanced, though, don’t worry about it right away), some logic about what users are allowed to do (like due dates can’t be in the past or players can’t have more than x hitpoints no matter how many health packs they use), maybe some communication with other APIs (but again, that’s advanced, don’t worry about it right away), and honestly, that’s pretty much it.

You can try mashing up different tutorials or open source projects too. Let’s say you have a tutorial for a driving game and one for a game where you run around and collect coins or stars or whatever. What if you could drive around and collect stars? What if you had tutorials for a todo list app and a weather app and mashed them up to make a little morning dashboard for yourself?

Don’t forget, you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are great communities like CodeNewbie, /r/learnprogramming, CodeRanch, (and lots more if you do a little Googling) full of people who will help you out.