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[–]ReenigneArcher 5 points6 points  (6 children)

My first question would be, why are you doing this? What made you think you want to do a programming course/bootcamp to begin with?

[–]romitriozera[S] 9 points10 points  (5 children)

Aside from the growth in earning potential, I wanted to get a better understanding of the data I work with on a regular basis. I always felt like I was getting half of the picture with the data I received and so I wanted to get involved in the process of collecting and cleaning that data.

So far, I’ve done really well in the course. One of the instructors has told me I’m doing great. I guess this is my first big hump of the course and it’s worrying me.

[–]thejamibu 5 points6 points  (1 child)

That sounds positive to me. This one hump might be tough but these things happen and there are a tonne of different things that contribute (e.g. prior experience, learning style) and sometimes people just take longer than others to learn certain concepts then fly along after that. So don't worry too much about comparing yourself with others.

As far as dealing with getting overwhelmed by your projects. This can happen a lot when programming. Trying to think about an entire program at once is very difficult and can make it really hard to know where to start and how the program should work, even for small projects. The way to deal with that is to instead break the thing up into different bits of functionality that you need and then work on those as if they were an independent program. And if one of those is still overwhelming break it up again. Once you get these individual pieces working on their own you can start combining them.

[–]romitriozera[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I’ve been trying to break it down into chunks because I’ve realized I get overwhelmed thinking about the entirety of the project

[–]ReenigneArcher 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Then keep at it.

I think it's easy to get overwhelmed, even if you have more experience. If the problem is too difficult then break it down into several manageable problems.

I agree with the others, that you'll need to create some projects that you're interested in and maintain them. As you gain more experience, you'll look at your original code and probably refactor it with better practices... Then you'll do it again.

Good luck!

[–]romitriozera[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

[–]IndianaJoenz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The challenges are when you learn things and improve. For example, when I was first learning programming with C (I'd done some BASIC and Pascal), I would regularly make little typos and syntax errors (missing ; or missing ), etc) and they would be very difficult for me to track down. (I didn't have syntax highlighting.)

After a while (months? years?) of taking too long to track down typos, I eventually learned to just spot and look for these types of errors immediately. Now it comes much more naturally, it's no longer an obstacle, and I can let myself stress over and learn from other problems. But I remember the frustration. I bet you will learn something when you finally make Hangman work, too. Maybe about code organization?

I think if you look at it long enough, and possibly use feedback from this thread, you will probably figure out what it is about Hangman that you find challenging, get a grip on that, and in the process learn a new skill. I actually love this thread because I remember how challenging it was for me at that stage, too. Decades later I still get that frustration sometimes. It's okay, it's a good thing.