The journey begins
Here’s the deal. I have not been a science person (or perhaps this is just the way that my life went but I was born to build some rockets and other incredible vehicles), though I always like computers and all things technology.
I am constantly amazed by the times we live in. Every information is just one step away and the Internet is an incredible source of knowledge. When you want to put in the time, you can learn anything — and this usually won’t cost you any money. Taking this into consideration, the only thing that can keep you from learning is the lazy you.
Programming was always something that was somewhere around my life. I always liked finding solutions to various problems. Making something out of nothing was an incredibly satisfying feeling that cannot be compared to anything else. The beginnings are very difficult though. It can be a bit discouraging when after working for a few weeks, the only thing you can show others is a very simple app printing strings to the terminal. Now, for me that was impressive. I’ve done it myself, but nobody understood why I was doing such a big of a deal of this thing. There are so many awesome applications (be it the websites or mobile apps) that it is difficult to be appreciated by people used to such standards.
Patience is the key though. After the initial struggle, the results should come and be quite impressive. The most important thing is to keep going. I like quick results though, that’s why I got interested in web development as this allows to see the results immediately.
Now, the second problem was the technology… There are so many resources, so many languages and without guidance, I simply tried to learn everything at once. The issue was, I did no go very far with either of those. Whenever I hit a wall, I thought ‘hey, maybe the other thing will be simpler’. Guess what? It was not. The walls were everywhere, but I blamed it on myself. Finally, I thought that I won’t be able to learn anything and perhaps this is not a way for me.
This is when I found this great TED Talks speech which inspired me once again: a youtube link to this speech
The speaker tried to prove that it takes 20 hours of practice to understand something. The way it was explained was very convincing and encouraging. This motivated me to start again. This time more focused and without any breaks.
I chose Ruby and a framework based on this language — Rails and will stick to it for at least the next year. Why Ruby? There is a lot of materials, the community seems really open and helpful and the syntax is very newbie friendly.
I read somewhere that a good technique to remember things and understand hard concepts is to try to explain it to somebody. People usually don’t have too much patience though (especially if you try to tell them something that does not interest them one bit). A dog could be helpful. Dogs listen to everything. I don’t have a dog though. That is why I decided to start a blog.
It does not matter if nobody reads it in the end. What matters to me is that I can imagine an invisible reader, who checks out what I have learnt each week. I will try to satisfy this imaginary reader.
Keep your fingers crossed!
Originally published at marcindrozd.com on November 27, 2014.
