Overcoming Challenges

Do me a favor, take a deep breath. Count to four. Then breathe out. Did you feel that? Feels great don’t it? I cannot stress this enough when it comes to learning new things or more specifically coding… Whether you like it or not the truth is learning how to code or aspiring to be a software developer/engineer( they are one in the same btw. many would argue the difference, but that’s not we’re here for) is easy, but not simple. To the contrary belief that you need a mathematic degree or need to know trigonometry(and yes I used autocorrect on that don’t ask I did not know how to spell it) it is quite simple really, all it takes is repetition and maybe a little bit of brain power just to memorize functions and logics.

Training

If you are like me and grew up in the 90’s or actually were a 90’s kid, you probably watched a bunch of action films starring your typical macho man esque actors i.e., Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme. You may or may not seen their training videos some type of training they go through before they star in films OR even during films and you know how rigorous it is. For example on Rocky or Kickboxer or even Blood sport these guys actually trained themselves, and no cgi of course, with complete absolute no distractions what so ever. It is the same type of movement and memorization before an actual fight, over and over and over until when they get into the arena. It is the same thing, coding is like after you have learned what a function is, what goes in the body; what an array is; what a variable is; what a constant is; and how do you structure each code properly, it is just repetition.

Learn to take breaks

There are many many techniques when it comes to studying, me personally I do the The Pomodoro Technique. Before discovering this special technique I used to study all day back in my college days without breaks, yeah, not a good idea. I have adopted many others, but the ones I have think works well — but it tires you out and you get burned out is, study 3 hours ATLEAST a day. I want to give credits to a wonderful instructor of mines: Mark Wahlbeck @ devslopes academy. It helps! and you know what else it. actually WORKs.. a friend of mine who graduated a cs degree now makes more than I’ll ever, once told me study 10 hours a day coding. I thought to myself what!? No way bro? I can not stress this enough that you will definitely get burnt out and wondering what the bleep! am I going to do with my life.

Remember to always ALWAYS absolutely take breaks — step away from the PC for while, get away from anything that has to do with coding, do not even think about it, it might even take you a week just to figure out what basically goes into a variable or for me it took me a whole month to figure out what is even a function is and how do you even write it out. I had no clue what was a parameter name and an argument label is.

Here’s a variation of the greet(person:) function that takes a person’s name and hometown and returns a greeting:

func greet(person: String, from hometown: String) -> String {

return “Hello \(person)! Glad you could visit from \(hometown).”

}

print(greet(person: “Bill”, from: “Cupertino”))

// Prints “Hello Bill! Glad you could visit from Cupertino.”

My favourite… ‘String Interpolation.’ ! Confused? Don’t worry about it you’ll get there it’s easy!

Conclusion

Take a breather; take breaks; take a half week or even month long vacation away from learning how to code! I didn’t say it was easy, but it’s simple!