Feeling frustrated! Anyone else feel the same?

i have a general question to ask!!! (i mostly see it as an observation in myself, this is why im asking)

im new to development, and im finding that im getting very frustrated with myself about the lack of progress i am making on things. I think this is mostly because when im testing application/sites i dont find myself looking at code all that much and when i am im reading it not writing it.

when you guys first started out did you get annoyed with your self for lack of progress or not understanding something the first time? ( or am i just being impatient and beating myself up a bit to much? lol)

thanks.

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Frustration for lack of progress is something most developers can relate to. What is important, is to never give up, and to identify where the problem lies and what you can do about it. And making the problems small enough(not necessarily few enough), to make it less overwhelming.

This is coming from someone who has been tinkering with this for over 20 years, but only really flourished since last august. That is when I landed a development job, where I could focus on learning coding, and really start my journey. But I have lots of experience as a teacher/instructor/counselor from my previous career, and might have some advice for you.

Before I start anything, I want to make two points.

  • The best advice I can give a learner, is to get a mentor. Find someone with the skills you would like to learn, and you look up to, and ask if he/she can mentor you. Nothing can beat having a good mentor.

  • Nothing worth doing/learning comes easy.

With that out of the way, here comes the lecture: :slight_smile:

If you’re new to development, it is really important to take that into account when you set your ambitions. Programming is hard in itself, and adding game development on top of that doesn’t make it easier. Remember that, even though tools like Defold makes it easy to put something to the screen, that this is complicated matters.

When you hit an issue that you can’t solve, isolate it and work on it until you understand how it works. Do your research and ask for help. But most important, write your own code. You can copy others, but never copy & paste(as in CTRL + C - CTRL + V). Always write it yourself.

This is an important teaching principle. When learning a new skill, learning methods can be ranked something like: Reading about it, hearing about it, writing/drawing about it, doing it, teaching it. I don’t remember all the numbers, but I think reading had about 10% retention, hearing about 20%, and doing it about 70-80%.

Another important thing to do, is having realistic goals. It’s easy to get carried away, and get in way over your head, and that will kill your enthusiasm when you get stuck over time. Write down your grand plans, and break it down into what skills you need to achieve your goal. Then make a plan for how to learn those skills, by making small projects, where you up the ambition every time. You are stacking skills, until you reach a level where you can approach your grand project. Until then, your goal should be to keep feeding your feeling of success. Small goal are easier to achieve.

Everybody has ambitions to do something they are unable to do right now. I have a dream-project myself, which I’ve had for the last 15 years. But I know that there’s no way, that I’ll be able to make it come close to what I want. So I leave it dormant until I’m ready for it. And as new ideas come all the time, I just file them someplace on the path towards my ultimate goal. :slight_smile:

My point with this wall of text, is something like the old question; how do you eat an elephant? One small piece at a time.

Don’t give up! :slight_smile:

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Well said @rsletta. Hang in there @Sphera!

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thanks @rsletta i full understand where you are coming from.

I have broken things down in to more manageable chucks and that seems to be going well. I liked your point about writing code and not copying and pasting it. Thats a really valid point. goes and deletes hacked together code

I have started on a plurasight course for Lua and already thats going well (1 hour in to it). Finding a mentor is a great idea, i have asked people if they know lua and they have all said no, so thats might be a tricky, but in time im sure I will find someone.

Thanks very much for the support and advice, I think I was just having a down day and I was getting really annoyed with myself!!!

:grin:

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It’s of course beneficial if your mentor is a Lua master, but I’d say that any really experienced developer is almost just as good. You want access to the experienced developers ability to solve problems, break down a large project into small manageable chunks, organise code and knowledge of how to write maintainable and easy to understand code. If you know another programming language a lot of the knowledge is transferrable to Lua.

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I would like to second what @britzl says. By learning the principles of programming and development, learning syntax and language specifics will be a walk in the park. :+1:

Edit:
In 2010, I spent a couple of weeks trying to kickstart my knowledge, by following Stanford Uni’s “CS106A - Programming Methodology”( http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ ). You could check it out. Everything is available online, and it has assignments that makes it easier to focus. My solution to the 3 first assignments are available on GitHub, if they can be of any help( https://github.com/rsletta/CS106A ). A fair warning though; the code might not be very pretty. I’ll see if I can translate the comments, if they’re still not in english.

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Yes i think i have jumped a little bit in to the deep end, but thats kinda of the way i like it.

I know HTML and CSS im learning Javascript too. I do have 1 friend that knows lua, he use to use it in one of the minecraft mods (computercraft). I think i might go and bug him.

Thanks @rsletta for the links, i will take a look this evening.

I really appreciate all the kind words of encouragement . thanks again.

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