Conversation

Learning python update: I seem to have crossed some threshhold into "being able to google things"; after asking a lot of people a lot of questions, I now have a vague intuition for how coding kind of "works", which is making it *way* easier to figure things out myself.

447

Aella

@Aella_Girl

Twice now I've asked other coders a question, they didn't know the answer (despite googling), and then I went away and figured it out on my own. This was *stupidly* satisfying (i'm not any more skilled, just put way more total time into it, but it feels SO empowering)

4:01 AM · Jun 1, 2022

Replying to

the feeling of cracking a problem in coding is really an amazing high, i had no idea how good it would be Anyway I think I crossed this threshold at around... maybe 15-20 hours of direct focused learning

202

Aella

@Aella_Girl

Jun 1, 2022

(er, to be clear i mean 'direct focused learning' as like asking people fast questions and demanding satisfaction to immediate curiosity to figure out solutions; I spent many more hours on my own "practicing", like fucking around with stuff I already kind of knew)

Replying to

This is a common enough experience among programmers that "rubber duck debugging" has its own wikipedia article.

Replying to

and

Yeah this is basically how our professor at NYU taught us to code. The same approach works for an unbelievable amount of non-programming problems too.

Replying to

It's a constant flip flop between "I'm an idiot" and "I am a god amongst men, behold my works".

Replying to

What a great example of how sweat & persistence builds 'real' confidence and self-esteem. It's based on evidence, "I DID this hard thing", not fluffy affirmations.

Replying to

Congratulations, we're now past the Aella-singularity