"Learning To Code Feels Like A Chore. Will I Ever Develop Passion For This?"
Aug 13, 2024Season 1Episode 168
Don Hansen
Learning to code can feel like a grind, and for some, the passion might never develop. In this video, I respond to a viewer who's feeling burned out and frustrated, questioning if they'll ever truly enjoy coding. I'll discuss the reality that, for some people, the passion for coding might never develop, and that's okay. Maybe coding isn't the right fit, and there's no shame in that. I also talk about the possibility that passion could come with time, but it’s important to be honest with yourself about what excites you. If you're struggling to find joy in coding, this video might help you figure out your next steps.
Disclaimer: The following may contain product affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. I will only ever provide affiliate links for apps that I've used and highly recommend.
Learning to code can feel like a grind, and for some, the passion might never develop. In this video, I respond to a viewer who's feeling burned out and frustrated, questioning if they'll ever truly enjoy coding. I'll discuss the reality that, for some people, the passion for coding might never develop, and that's okay. Maybe coding isn't the right fit, and there's no shame in that. I also talk about the possibility that passion could come with time, but it’s important to be honest with yourself about what excites you. If you're struggling to find joy in coding, this video might help you figure out your next steps.
Disclaimer: The following may contain product affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. I will only ever provide affiliate links for apps that I've used and highly recommend.
If I find learning to code a chore now and I get better, will the passion develop eventually? I'm going to be answering that question that someone asked my comments, so let's just dive into it. So, don, if I may ask for your honest advice? I am trying to become better at building and debugging, but I get burned out easily because I'm not good at it, which is also making me dislike the coding work, which is also making me dislike the coding work, which also impedes my progress. If I find it a chore now, once I get better, will the passion develop? How can I make myself like the hard parts more? Thank you. So if I find it a chore now, once I get better, will the passion develop? The short answer is maybe, maybe not. It's too soon to tell, so I'm going to dive into the details of what I mean by this, but it's possible. Coding isn't for you, and I think you might need to be willing to come to terms with that. And I also think it's possible that there are other traits about you that need to be refined and built up to be able to handle being a developer which can be developed, which can make you enjoy coding more, and I think coding is just introducing a different type of challenge or maybe it's even a different type of difficulty of challenge that you just didn't expect. So it could be a skill issue, it could be an interest issue, but we're going to dive in a little bit more. You had made so I saw kind of a and I don't want to out people in my comments. I honestly just don't feel like typing out responses in my comments. I hate typing responses. I don't like text, I like video, so I don't want to out people asking these questions.
Don Hansen:
But there was a follow-up kind of chain of conversation and I remember you saying I find learning it and implementing tedious and frustrating, especially since I am new. There's a lot of debugging. In the end, I find it is a lot of debugging. In the end I find it is a lot of work for mediocre results. What you're saying is just truth. You should Really seek out a mindset that loves the grind of getting better Not producing this feature necessarily, but just finding pleasure in going through the process of getting better. And what I can tell you is this is part of the process you spending hours, sometimes days, especially in the beginning. Debugging is part of you getting better. So you have to decide am I frustrated because I'm not good enough right now, or I don't trust that I'm making meaningful progress? And I don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel, because I can tell you what you're going through now is normal. It's very normal, and I don't know if that helps alleviate the burnout for you, because burnout is a really tricky thing. What I suspect is you're experiencing burnout because you're not really seeing the fruit of your labor and there's a lot of labor. So all I can tell you right now is that is normal. Get comfortable with that. Get at peace with that. You're not going to skip this part.
Don Hansen:
Many developers, just like you, get frustrated at how many bugs they have to go through and how little features they develop in the beginning and how easily they're able to get tripped up over their own code, just going back into it over a week and then spending a lot of time just getting comfortable with okay, what was this function doing again? Oh yeah, now I can go on to the feature that I was trying to build, because this is like a core piece of it and I got to use this. Right, they're going to be going back into your code, you're going to be refreshing yourself on how your logic works. This is going to be a repetitive process over and over and over and over, and I think something that could be telling whether you're going to enjoy this or not is you know, six months into this, are you just as frustrated and burned out with having to debug the dumbest bugs that you think you will never develop and you eventually will? You have to debug typos in just really stupid shit that you just don't want to deal with? Do you? In six months, do you find that you're still getting burned out going through that? Because, in reality, you should be getting through those bugs a little bit faster. Right, if you are really building up a core, solid foundation, you should be getting through those bugs faster and faster.
Don Hansen:
As you go through your learning to code journey. You go through your learning to code journey. It's really hard to identify exactly what burned you out, but I suspect that diving into the dev world has introduced just a different type of challenge, and I often say this becoming a developer changes you. It changes your mindset around just being able to identify problems and becoming a problem solver, really exploring that creativity as well, to be able to link what you are building or what you are learning technically with being able to build real useful things for people. You should really be open to just being willing to solve little problems that your friends and your family have. You should be willing to solve, you know, weird technical network issues with your internet when, like, even if it's an internet issue, right when you finally get to the solution and hopefully you don't have comcast, because this can change this entire scenario but when you finally get to the solution, you should feel good about everything that you had to learn to get to that final solution, to finally fix your network issue. And if, if you just look back at that and maybe this is just a perspective thing because you've you've grown you're able to debug more network issues a little bit more quickly, especially when it's the same issue and that is coding You're going to experience these bugs over and over and over and you're going to be able to first of all, you're going to experience it a lot less often if it's the same bug, but you're also, when you do identify that bug, what happens when you join a dev team and you go into their code base? They're experiencing a bug that you fixed in your last position or even in your personal project, and you're going to be able to solve that much faster because you. You've seen that developers are quick at what they do because they've fucked up over and over and over and they remember their fuck-ups, they remember their mistakes, they learn from it, they grow from it and they're able to account for these issues going into a new application. But they're also able to debug these issues faster because they've experienced it.
Don Hansen:
I've shared this story before, but I, you know, in my second deposition. I remember um mentioning to my boss that I had a thousand page css book because it blew my mind how good the developers on the team were at CSS. I'm like I want to get this good. I am going to study and I am going to learn everything that I possibly can about CSS. I'm going to be better than everyone on the team at this. I want to be the go-to person for this and I had a lot of conviction and I was going to do that. My boss said you're going to forget most of that. The developers on the team are good at what they do because they've experienced so many CSS bugs building stuff that they just remember it, that's it, and so that's what learning to code is.
Don Hansen:
Learning to code is it's just making a ton of mistakes along the way and getting better. Because you made those mistakes, because you went through that grueling debugging process, because you were frustrated because you thought you were gonna get this feature out and it took an entire day to debug a typo. And and what often happens is when you stop putting so much pressure on yourself to get this right the first time, I find a lot of people. They start to enjoy those, they start to have these aha moments when they do solve the bug and when they do have confidence, like next time I see this bug, I'm going to be able to identify it, or I learned something new, or I didn't know this about this framework.
Don Hansen:
That was such a weird bug, a weird tangent, that I went down Like, for example, I'm learning NestJS right now and I'm getting more comfortable with that, and I am getting more comfortable with TypeScript as well and even writing I can't even say this because I don't know it well enough but even writing proper types, there was still a bug with NestJS when it was loading it, where it wasn't matching it correctly with what I had set up in GraphQL and it was this weird tangent that I went down. I got no features done whatsoever. This weird tangent that I went down, I got no features done whatsoever. But I'm like at the end of it I'm like this is really interesting. I had no um like it just helped me understand typescript just a little bit better. It helped me understand some quirks with going with um like a schema approach with nest js and graph ql and I had fun with it. I didn't end up building anything um. I think I got like one resolver done at the end.
Don Hansen:
But like, looking back at it, yes, in that moment it was kind of frustrating, but I've learned to love these weird tangents I go down and I love it because I know I'm growing from it. It's kind of like it's training my brain to identify this kind of problem not even this specific problem, but this kind of problem If I use TypeScript again, if I use NestJS again, and I had to look through tons of documentation and I learned stuff. But I have confidence that I really did learn stuff and that's the goal. The goal is to just constantly grow, not to build stuff. Building stuff will happen when you get a lot of these concepts down and you'll go faster eventually. But the aha moments come from solving these weird quirks and bugs, because I feel good that I was able to solve this problem, this mini problem. I didn't solve the big problem of building my app, but I solved this mini problem of understanding why the hell this bug was just eating at me for hours on stream in front of people. But when I got to the end, I had that aha moment and I felt good about it.
Don Hansen:
So I think what needs to happen is I think you need to have more patience with yourself and I think you need to slow it down and give yourself probably a much longer runway to become a developer. I suspect that that might be an issue as well. Maybe you're panicked with time I don't know your situation but I think you need to be more patient. This is part of the process. This is normal. Now, to answer your question will the passion develop? Time will tell, because what you're describing, what I described, is kind of a normal process and actually a very common process for developers, where they expect to build something very quickly and they're realizing it takes a lot longer. They have to go through a lot more bugs, debugging and it could be frustrating, and, but what you're experiencing can also so. So it can indicate that, but it can also indicate that you're forcing yourself to learn to code. Maybe you're not meant to become a developer. I can't tell you that. Only time will right. You're going through a very early stage of the process. My advice to you is get through it and then decide from there. But I have a feeling you have to give yourself a lot more time than you've given yourself to even have this question, and that's just the length and duration that's needed to really grow as a junior developer to even get hired. It's a long process and you got to give yourself time with that. Now it also can mean a third thing. Maybe you're learning something.
Don Hansen:
A lot of people think, for some reason, that it's easiest to become a front-end developer. Everyone wants to become a front-end developer. Everyone wants to learn the same thingml, css, javascript and react. Everyone goes through the same templated path, and I cannot think of a more boring thing to do than try to go through the same templated path that almost everyone else is going through, and now I'm competing with them by knowing the same information as them, by going down the same path as them. No, I got into coding because I'm excited to build, I'm excited to solve problems. I, I've done that for many, many years, and I've done that since my teenage years, right, I, I just love what I can create from it. And if I want to create some stupid little app for my favorite video game you know, like I did that as a teenager when I was younger then I'm gonna do that. I don't need to. I don't want to go down this templated path of becoming a software engineer, like whatever the hell that means, right?
Don Hansen:
There are so many different avenues of software engineering that you can explore, and maybe you're just going down a templated path you were told to go down and, um, maybe you're getting into javascript and you just hate javascript. Why are you working with it? Maybe you need to spend more time at the back end. Maybe you actually love hml and css and that's where you want to spend most of your time, right, I think? If you're not, so, one thing I would challenge you to do, like almost immediately, is if you're going through the debugging process and learning something and you're frustrated, you're not enjoying what you're learning. Learn something else. There are a lot of different avenues of software engineering. Learn something else and see if that ignites a fire in you. See if that ignites passion in you, because maybe you're just learning the wrong thing. That could be it as well. So, yeah, my short answer is maybe, maybe not. It's too soon to tell, but I hope this helps. Good luck.
