Not long ago I read this blog post Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard, which makes a really interesting point about the “desert of despair” between beginning to learn to code and having the skills to build a complete project on your own. The desert of despair, according to the post (which I agree with) is a combination of lack of resources for learners who are between beginner and expert, and having learned enough to know how much you still have to learn. Many aspiring coders get lost in the desert of despair and never find their way out.
I also read Amy Hoy’s post 5 Things I Wish Somebody Told Me Before I Founded My SaaS. One of the points I found the most interesting was that there’s always another inflection point. By inflection point, she means “those knife-edges you tip toe along, when things could go either way, when you are, say… trying to grow your team but lack the time/revenue to do it, but growing your team would help increase the time/revenue to the point where you could grow your team. Ouch. To me, that’s the prototypical inflection point.”
Where this ties back to the other post is where Amy says “Over the last 8 years running this biz, I have said so many times: “We just have to get through this $INFLECTIONPOINT and then things will get easier.”” Doesn’t that remind you of programming?
If I can just learn enough to get my code to compile then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough to add a feature to an existing project then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough to start a project on my own, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough to break my code down into good methods, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough to break my code down into good classes, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough to break my code down into good layers, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough design patterns, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn this new framework, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn this new style of programming, then things will be easier.
If I can just build enough different projects, then things will be easier.
If I can just learn enough…
There’s always going to be something else to learn, it’s never going to become easy and stay that way. Things do get easier once you find your way out of the desert of despair, but initially learning to code just leads to worrying about whether your code is good leads to worrying about design and architecture and scalability and reliability and security and those are seriously hard problems.
Despite how it may sound, I’m actually not trying to say that coding will suck forever and you should just give up. I’m saying that it’s normal to feel like you still suck at this even after years of working as a programmer. You don’t actually suck, it’s just normal to feel that way. What’s really happening is you’ve levelled up. When you do that you see the problems that used to give you trouble as too simple to count and focus on the stuff you aren’t good at yet, which can easily make you think you suck.
The thing I struggle with is design. I’ve been at this for ten years now and I’m still never sure if I’ll regret the design I’ve come up with the next time we add a feature to the system. Plenty of times I’ve come up with something that seemed like a good idea at the time, only to find out that it had serious flaws when I came back and changed it later.
It’s tough sometimes but on the upside, you will never ever run out of things to learn as a programmer :)
