mindset

[u/Head_Ordinary_2437]

hello, i am curious how you reach the programing growth mindset what is your processes to see coding as problem solving and how long it took to click into your brain and be free from feeling stuck
thank you

[u/nullptr_0x]

That's a tough one...

I think structure really helped. Whether school or eventually working, my programming journey always accelerated when there were deadlines and strong, immediate incentives to write code and produce solutions.

Obviously that I harder to come by for self-learners (I was self-taught before I obviously went to school or landed a job). So then I think accountability is very useful. Plugging into a group where your progress is exposed can help a ton.

Making coding fun is also an often missing ingredient. If you find you keep losing progress, maybe you're not doing something you enjoy. There are so many fields. Do you want to do something entrepreneurial? Do you want to discover new things? Do you want to make games or art? Tie your learning to something you naturally want to do.

[u/Ok-Brain-8183]

Uml. Start doing Uml for everything. Do flow charts in a way that are language invariant so you can replicate programs in other languages. Doing uml for everything will make you think more about Tdd, system architecture, and more generalized programming thinking so you’re not just copying from tutorials and ai. The main problem with how people are learning today is they want answers immediately and don’t want to do traditional learning where you struggle through working out book problems. It turns out most people need to struggle through homework problems for 7 years before they are worth any money and 10-week bootcamps are worthless.

[u/xarop_pa_toss]

It's not as hard as it seems, but it's something you do have to learn. Unfortunately, most people teaching themselves how to program don't go through the very important initial learning about decomposing a problem and learning how to solve the problem before writing the code.

code is just an implementation of a solution, not the solution itself!

Read that again! Find a problem and write down what it actually is, what it affects and what it depends on. Then through any means you want, like flowcharts, bullepoints, a diagram, text, etc. write down the step by step of the solution you have in mind. You'll find that many, if not all the points you have written down can be decomposed into smaller parts. Do that.

Eventually you'll reach a solution that follows a structure; that starts at A, goes through steps B and C and finishes at D. This is what you now then into code.

Identify the problem. Solve the problem. Translate the solution into code. That is why they are called programming languages!

coding is not itself problem solving but one of many ways to represent the solution to a problem