How I learned Programming, Figuring it out, Connecting the dots (Noob Lessons)
I was fascinated by computers since i was young. We were taught Information Technology as a subject in our school even though there was no national curriculum for the subject. So when I was in grade 7 our IT teacher taught us programming (at least he tried). He said that there is a programming language called Java and made us memorize some weird words in English but these stuff never made sense to me.
Me as a kid never liked the concept of memorizing stuff. I used to have very low grades for almost every subject those days because our syllabus was pretty much content based. So, even though I liked computers so much, I hated programming. This was traumatized in my brain so I didn’t even try to learn programming since then.
Fast forward to 2017. I joined the ICT society and, it was the place where I was exposed to people who were also passionate in technology(these weirdos play video games and watch anime almost all the time). I focused on designing because of the trauma in my head. But I had the opportunity to team up and participate in many competitions and Hackathons. That was where I saw basically “coding” and solving problems is not actually what I thought it was. But because of the typical stress of a local Advance Level student, I wasn’t able to learn coding until end of the exam.
So after the exam, I started with HTML and CSS, learned a little bit of JavaScript, Python and C++. I had the need to learn so I kept trying but couldn’t find a proper path to master one language and go deeper.
Even though people say Indian guys in YouTube can teach coding better that colleges, It was college where I had the opportunity to go deeper with programming. In the freshman year I took a programming 101 class called “Unix and C programming” and I learned how computers actually work. After taking this class, all the dots started to connect. I could see where everything I have learned fit in the big picture. That was the moment I realizes now I know how to learn coding and go forward.
Then I started hustling. Learned object oriented concepts in Java, yeah! the exact language which caused me to hate programming. Got some intuition of data structures and algorithms as well. This is when I got to watch this clip from Lex Fridman Podcast which Geohot and Lex talk about how to learn programming.
Now you get the idea. If you wanna learn programming, there is no other way. Go, find a problem, and solve it. Be curious about how things work and be hungry for knowledge. It may not make sense at first. You may feel like you can’t understand this at all. But trust me, If you keep trying, it will be definitely worth it.
Yet I’m not a “pro” coder. But this is where I’m heading right now. It is a pretty fun ride.
