The four phases of the typical journey into coding
- The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
- The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it’s a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can’t actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
- The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you’re frequently going in circles and you’re starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the “Mirages of Mania”, like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
- The Upswing of Awesome is when you’ve finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you’ve mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you’re terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don’t know how to get to “production ready” code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?
Which phase are you in?
AI is a pretty good tool for this sort of thing though. If you don’t know what to ask, or need an example, etc.
Yeah, but they literally used the term as used in Warhammer lore: A.I.
In Warhammer AI is forbidden on the grounds of past wars with humanity
Oh, I totally forgot about this bit. Maan, I really want to write “a practical guide for programming with the Omnissiah.”, a book of fun rituals and litanies to support your software development. I always felt like computers are kind of really literally magical, and adopting a more spiritualistic approach to programming sounds like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any existing spiritualism that would match this, Tech Priests being really close to what I was going for.
I need to add more litanies and copious amounts of censer into my programming workflow.
Thou shalt not repeat yourself
Thou shalt extract common functionality into smaller functions
Neat. Kinda like Dune
Yeah, I wanted to reference Dune, too, but then thought that it’s not a very rare trope. On a related note, I took a look at tvtropes and it says that in the Dune the AI didn’t wage war, it was humans that didn’t like what AI does and prohibited it. I read the books too long ago to remember if this is so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯