The four phases of the typical journey into coding
- The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
- The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it’s a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can’t actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
- The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you’re frequently going in circles and you’re starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the “Mirages of Mania”, like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
- The Upswing of Awesome is when you’ve finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you’ve mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you’re terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don’t know how to get to “production ready” code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?
Which phase are you in?
Very accurate. Working for a small dev shop with sympathetic senior team members brought me through 2 and into the start of 3. But a job change (into something I only barely qualified for) meant I had to trek phase 3 alone. It’s a loong slog, and the myriad of technologies in the intro without ever feeling like you know anything is spot on (I would frequently be reading web pages for help only to pull my hair out at how often they mentioned things I should know but didn’t). Fortunately I had gone to work for an IT team embedded in a larger company, not a software company itself, and they had far lower standards. I don’t think that’s a good thing in general, but it did allow me to get semi hacky things done during the desert of despair and I felt like I was delivering just as often as I was floundering. The upswing of awesome is real though. I hit it about 5 or 6 years in. I found my niche, everything id been reading and studying suddenly started to reinforce one another rather than sow deeper confusion and confidence and productivity started to multiply. About 7 years in I was technical lead in a couple of business critical areas. After 8 years I started my own consultancy in those technologies and have never looked back. I take care now to give junior staff projects that stretch them, and they need to work at, but which aren’t soul crushing.