My question:
When it comes to the flatiron fullstack web development program, I often got derailed, discouraged and set back. These set backs were not all because of the program itself; the lessons were pretty clear and doable. In addition, there was almost always a simple sollution to the road blocks I faced.
Learning to code, at first is a seen as a herculean task that only geniuses could accomplish. In addition, there is the question of where does one even begin to code, microsoft excel? Paint? Also, what does one need to code. Movies often depict a coder as some type of super hacker that works out of a van with a thick laptop that has a bunch of antennas sticking out of it. However, there is no need for a randomly thick off brand laptop in order to begin coding. Most modern day computers will do just fine and be able to run the neccesary programs to handle coding projects.
The final flatiron project, one would think that by this time, the code just flows. However, this project allowed the most freedom and that freedom made the project infinitely more difficult. In addition, the reqirements for this project were relatively easy to meet and react is able to . With that, the issue was being overloaded with possibilities and react allows for many different ways to reach a goal. Thus, contrary to previous projects where goals or steps needed to get to the goal were clear, everything was a bit up in the air.
The web development program currently goes ruby, sinatra, rails, javascript, react then redux. Each transition came with their own challenges; before getting to javascript, the main transition hurdle has been understanding new concepts. The challenge with going from sinatra to javascripts was understanding a new concept while having trouble communicating thoughts. It is a bit cliche to compare learning a new coding language to learning a new actual language; however, there is a reason this cliche exists and it was evident during the section and project. The silver lining of the challenge is that the same skills to overcome previous hurdles are still effective. In that, the main skills that have been useful up until javascript have been reading errors, googling and some advice I got from a flatiron instructor; his advice was to relax and evaluate three things the return value you want to get, the return value you are getting and the code dictating your output.