Hard Learning: Everything’s Difficult Until You Know How to Do It
While waiting for my daily cold-brew coffee at Starbucks one morning this week I was transported back in time when the radio began playing a song I hadn’t heard in years: More Than Words by Extreme. Now say what you will about that song, but if you grew up in the 90’s and try to tell me you don’t know every word to it, I’m calling BS! Silly as it may sound, I have a special connection to that song, and every time I hear it I’m immediately transported back to a summer in the early 90’s when I locked myself in my room determined to learn how to play it on my pawn shop acoustic guitar. I was certain that it would have the ladies beating my door down.
Up to this point in my quest to learn the guitar I had stuck to the simple 3 chord strumming patterns that everyone starts out with. More Than Words though, required fingerpicking and string slapping which at the time was a BIG stretch for me technically. There was no Internet. There were no YouTube tutorials to hold my hand through the learning process. I had to do it all by ear. It took me a couple weeks, a lot of hard work and dedication, but I can proudly say I did it!
This morning as I sat down at my computer I was greeted with the following quote from my start-up page:
“Everything’s difficult until you know how to do it.” — Anonymous
As we wrapped up the second week at Codesmith’s Software Engineering Immersion, these words rang truer than ever. This week we moved from JavaScript fundamentals to the front-end of web development: HTML, CSS, and ReactJS. Front-end development is how the design you see on a website actually gets implemented on the web. While I had a decent bit of front-end experience coming into this program, this week taught me that there is always so much more to learn.
This week wasn’t all fun and games, but we had fun, and there were games. We started the week out recreating the classic Snake game. Now if you’re like me and ever had a Nokia phone, I’m sure you have played A LOT of Snake. Simple as it may seem, let me tell you, just like a snake in real life, it was not easy to get it to move where we wanted it to. Later in the week was the real challenge for me though. We had to build a Tic-Tac-Toe game from scratch using React, something I had heard of, but never even seen before.
Here at Codesmith, nothing is easy. If you aren’t struggling, you aren’t doing it right. This is part of the way they teach. Codesmith CEO, Will Sentance, calls this the “hard learning”. Many coding courses take the more conventional approach with tutorials that end up giving you the answer without making you work for it. I went through another coding course online earlier this year, and while I learned a lot from it, in the end, I didn’t really have a real comprehensive understanding of very many of the topics covered.
At Codesmith, we start each new unit with a brief lecture about the concepts we need to complete the challenges, but then we are set free to figure it out on our own. After a few hours of struggle, we come back for another lecture where we get a few more tips on how to solve the problem, but then it’s back to the trenches. One night this week I stayed way after hours trying to break down one of these barriers in my Tic-Tac-Toe game. I told myself I wasn’t going home until I could solve this one thing. Around 10 p.m. as I stared at my laptop trying not to pull my hair out, our lead instructor, Phillip, came and sat down next to me for a bit of moral support. He didn’t say much more than “hmmm” or “that’s a very good question, what do you think” when I would try to elicit his advice. He was gonna make me work for it, but just his presence let me know he was rooting for me. After another hour or so I finally worked it out and man did it feel good! Phillip gave me a smile and I could tell one of his favorite things about being a teacher here Codesmith was seeing how excited we get when we finally break through that block.
It’s been at least 25 years since I taught myself to play More Than Words, and while it never really helped me out with the ladies the way I hoped it would, I guarantee you I could still play it note for note if you put a guitar in my hand. I struggled to learn it, and because of that, it stuck with me. It’s imprinted in my memory and my fingers just know what to do. Only time will tell, but after that late night with Phillip, I have a pretty good feeling the next time I have to implement state in a React app, my fingers will know what to do then too.
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