My struggle is to find job. I started interesting in coding in April 2016. Step by step I started doing on-line courses. I liked it. Then started stationary course where I was fired after 2 weeks. I was fighting bravely, but it was their right in the agreement. They told me, I would never be a programmer. This Warsaw school called Coderslab is caring more about its reputation and quality of “products” for business than for its students. I t was very hard to me, as I lost financial support from national job agency. No course, and no money for another course. It was’t fair to me, as they were underling that they can learn coding people without any experience with coding before. As I wrote, it was hard hit to my ambitions and goal to became programmer.
I reign my self trust in this field (programming) this January when now financial possibilities occurred. And it was also time, I found You - freecodecamp.com. It motivated me so hard, I decided to take up another stationary course. I studied much agreement this time to make sure they can not kick me off from the course. Same time, I was working hard on fcc. Intensive, 6 weeks, day by day course, HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, AJAX, and my lovely PHP and MySQL. It’s 2 months since I graduated the course. Excluding one week for leave sick I get I have passed 1 month searching a job as a junior PHP developer. I am getting frustrated, but the same time having wife and three children, I am digging for victory. Each day, I go to library, study new materials about JS, watching vlogs and doing my applications in PHP. Sometimes it is hard to find strength inside and don’t stop believing succes will come, but I am doing it. I believe I can be a great developer and I work on achieving this goal: to start cooperation with a great company of developers from whom I can learn, learn and learn.
P.S. I am grateful for fcc and community around this idea.
Coding is a continuous learning process, I have been doing it for 10+ years and I still watch tutorials, ask google, and read books…you kind of have to do that with the amount of information out there! When you say you have been coding for 2 years, does that mean you started 2 years and you practice every day or is it just off and on? If you really want to learn and make things stick, you need to make it a habit by doing it over and over again. I bet if you dedicated 1 hour every (7 days a week) to coding in a few months you would be amazed and what you have learned!
Bottom line - if coding is what you want to do, don’t give up. It didn’t come easy for me, but its something I wanted to do and it is how I make a living today
In addition to reading, taking courses, and watching videos and tutorials produced by others, you’ve also got to hunker down and just write your own code. Dedicate a portion of your study time to writing. Use your imagination and create a problem to solve with a computer program. Think of something you’re comfortable doing, and then think of something you could add to that to make it better and also require you to learn something new in order to implement it. Best wishes!
Hey, I have had many successful web developer jobs without really doing any hard core JavaScript. Mostly CSS, HTML, jQuery and just a bit of JS. Then during the jobs I started coding more and more hard stuff. Get a job that allows you to learn…Start with an “easy” website without much pooha.
Are you enjoying coding? You can learn a lot of things, but if you aren’t enjoying the learning process, if you are suffering, then it may not be for you.
Programming requires a different mindset than a lot of other things in life. It sounds like that mindset is really where you are struggling. You have to look at what you want to have as result, and then think about the steps needed to get there, the parts of code that you need. Then flesh out those individual parts.
It can help to look at what other people have done. Look at their finished product, and think about what is involved in building it. What you need. Then look at their code to see how they built it. Everyone will build things a little differently, but being able to break things down and build them up that is essential to programming things on your own.
It sounds like you are watching a lot of tutorials and copying what others do. That can teach you a specific item, but it won’t teach you how to think. The process of knowing what you want the end result to be and then breaking it down and working out each of the parts that is what you need to be successful.
Even within programming, different languages, different programming styles, they all require different thought patterns. If you can’t get yourself to start learning different ways of thinking, then you won’t make progress. It is a skill that can be learned, but it’s not easy or fun for everyone.
I struggle with many things, and find myself most of the time in your same place, thinking that I’m not good enough, but I keep on pushing, your brain will retain the things that you do most of the time, I mean, what you repeat most of the time, and forget the others that don’t, but don’t feel bad with yourself because you can’t write code from memory, for me what is important is that you understand the logic, and like many others have said, when you find yourself stuck, do something else, most of the time do something not even related to programming, I have struggled for weeks to find the solution to a problem, but once I do, it’s like riding a bike downhill, even Albert Einstein said: “Never memorize something that you can lookup”.
Feeling like you’re stupid or not good enough when something is difficult is common for many people, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of doing it, and when you’re not capable of doing it…go and make yourself capable of doing it…don’t listen to your inner voice that tells you to quit…tell it to f#$$ itself and to let you finish what you’re doing
I’ve found as a beginner that learning JS while you haven’t mastered HTML and CSS can be very discouraging. I decided to put a brake on learning JS and JQuery, and have almost reached a point where I’m comfortable with the basics of HTML and CSS. I’ll add other languages and frameworks one at a time until I’ve mastered them.
Keep on doing what you are doing, the more you learn by working on live projects (even by watching tutorials) the more you will get a hang of it. It gets easier with practice, there’s no shortcut to that.
If you are worried that you need to look up for help when working on something, you are not alone. Coding/Development is mostly copy/paste and edit to suit your needs.
The more projects you work on, the better you will become at copy/paste/editing, in other words, coding.
Eventually, people will be copy/paste/editing your work and learn from you
I am working as a Frontend developer right now and I have less experience than you.
For the past 2 months I’ve been building a website at my current job with features that if you told me I would be building 6 months ago I wouldn’t have believed you, and the way I did it is the way I suspect most people do this stuff. You focus on a little problem at a time and you do the necessary research for it, it’s not a test or an exam you just need to build stuff that works. Even seniors research how to write basic stuff from time to time, you cannot retain everything, the important part is to have an idea of what the language is capable of and what would be an appropriate tool to use for a specific situation.
This realization, that you are not expected to retain and know everything helped met get through those first stages of panic and impostor syndrome you seem to be having. I don’t know what kind of job you aspire to get, me as a web developer, when a designer hands me a design with a functionality and says “this should do X when a user does Y” then I’m sure you would be able to do this, no one is watching you with a clock to see how fast you do it and I visit StackOverflow about 3 to 5 times on a given working day : ). I’m not saying all I do is copy and paste code but it’s very common to search how to do things or a reminder on how to properly write other things, or sometimes just to improve the code you wrote. If you have any specific questions about a real web developing work environment and daily issues just ask away.
Being said that, if you get a little bit excited with say, having an idea and looking at an empty CodePen or SublimeText file, or smirk a little when you write a simple click function and you click and wow, it works, then keep at it, that’s more than most people can say about their jobs.
@shabbir1993 … Thank you so much for your willingness to say what all of us have felt before, and have felt more than once for sure! Everyone here has contributed greatly to this conversation, so thank you all for your words. We’ve all benefited from reading and knowing that we are not alone on this journey.
'Imposter Syndrome" is alive and well in all of us, we just have to get used to the fact that we are going to feel it. As many have said, the important part is that we don’t give up and let the feelings of inadequacy win, instead we keep moving forward and win with patience and perseverance!
One thing I’ll add to this topic … Software development is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Like so many things in life, they take time to develop and you don’t ever quite ‘master’ it. What you do master is the ability to learn, comprehend, and think through the details in a logical manner. Once you get your 1st paid position as a software developer and you begin contributing to a project, you will discover that you’re not alone and you don’t have to know everything. Everyone out there, even the ‘genius’ group, takes this one step at a time.
I don’t think you’d put two years into something you didn’t enjoy. But code isn’t for everyone, it’s fine if you don’t love it. But, before you throw in the towel, have you taken an actual class, like with a teacher and assignments, and deadlines? If not, the problem may be your learning method. Everyone learns different. But I would find it hard to be self taught at something I had no foundation for. There are a lot of great resources to learn code on your own, but maybe one beginning level computer science class will be something to get a good foundation first. And you can do that online. There are online bootcamps and many colleges allow online student to take remote classes. But there are still instructors with assignments and lectures. All of it.
Somehow I never be able past the interview or live coding testing. my coding brain usually reaches a peak performance at the deep morning after sleeping or after sometimes coding so I can enter the “flow”. The interview and live-testing always done whether at noon or at afternoon when I’m in dumb state
Thankfully I’ve many connections and those guys just gives me some projects to do, well, at least I can fill my pocket and continue living
You should plan what you want to achieve with learning to code. In my case, I’ve been coding for fun, so I’m the example that maybe you want to avoid the most
For serious answer, do coding step by step without looking the tutorial or video. If you like the “hard-way”, you can code with looking the reference first in order to fill your “muscle-memory” and code again the 2nd or 3rd time without looking the reference. You would find the discrepancy between what you see, what you know, and what you understand.
For more generic answer, once you able to learn something, you can easily learn for another domain just like what I did with diverse programming topic (however I’m still struggling with how to design a web page so it can look as “godly” beautiful while still giving the most wanted performance )
Hi shabbir1993.
I hope you OK now. From my experience I can say, that most of the times it’s our expectations bring us all those negative emotions, bad mood… The truth is, that I love programming. Even if I won’t find a job as a programmer (still looking) I’m still happy that I can code and learn a lot everyday. In fact I want a programmer job because I want to learn more and make awesome projects for whole day everyday. Not just to be a programmer. Sometimes it drives me crazy when I think that I should have got that kind of job already. I’m so silly. I love programming and I CAN do it every day, so I just do it (and I usually happy with it). Expectation make me feel bad.
What I really wanted to mention is that you probably need to learn about HTTP protocol. It’s so widely used that everybody should learn it (I’m a pythonista and I feel I have to learn that too). Probably everything web-related uses HTTP (GET, PUT… methods). So maybe your biggest problem at the moment is to understand how HTTP works.
Check out these links about HTTP, I hope they’ll help: http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/ https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/http-the-protocol-every-web-developer-must-know-part-1–net-31177
I think someone mentioned it already, but I repeat what I think is important:
Great, i would of never learned coding without FCC. I like how they make me do it and figure it out. They make me build webpages on codepen just so i can figure out how to apply my skills.
You know what i do when i don’t know something or don’t feel like coding because, yes everyone has those days -i just simply head over to medium or some other website and sometimes even just turn off my computer then i go back to my code on the next day and look at it with fresh eyes because sometimes that’s just how things are we are tired and we miss stuff. I know for a fact that if you watch a TON of videos you will still be clueless or at least the concepts will not be solid in your mind.I am not saying never watch any just don’t make them your primary research option. And if you ever get discouraged because you can’t figure something out just leave for about 15 minutes and then come back to it. if you still can’t figure it out head over to the chat room on gitter and ask someone to help you (just don’t reject their input if they are being irrelevant.) and most of the time someone will be there to help you , especially with bootstrap.You are always going to be learning so never be afraid to ask someone there a literally thousands of people just waiting to help. And if you haven’t already try the front end projects on FCC and follow rule #1 WRITE YOUR OWN CODE. because if you cheat on those (like i did on my first two) you will not learn anything and you will be wasting your time just research and check the FCC guide or MDN and ask on the forum too
So good luck and don’t give up, ever.
here is the link to the chat room
Lel, a lot of motivators here … Lemme add another advise: It’s realistic to say that when one pain becomes obsolete, there’s high probability another one to take its place. So you can give up, but try to lower the number of pains you meet per day (for example you can start to hate Mondays)
or live coding testing. 
and those guys just gives me some projects to do, well, at least I can fill my pocket and continue living 
while still giving the most wanted performance )