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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

As I've gotten older I look back and wish I had any sort of mentor in my life for certain areas I struggled to learn in myself -- programming especially. I REALLY wanted to learn languages like C when I was a kid but it was just NOT happening. I was starting from nothing, borrowing library books I couldn't even remotely make sense of. I know for sure I could have learned, but it just wasn't going to happen by reading a textbook (especially when they all assumed I was running DOS, Windows or UNIX and I only had a Mac -- so the compiler disk they included was always completely useless to me). If I had a mentor in my life, even a junior/intermediate one, it would have been completely different. For this reason, I work especially hard to mentor people when I can, and open doors for them to show what's possible.

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Yes, and I really wish our primary education had any other IT classes than learning powerpoints, emails and making those funky 3D titles in word(I think this might be changing?). When I was 13 I was playing a cave flyer with my friends that had weapons programmed in lua files. We had so much fun copy pasting different weapons together, we even made an unofficial weaponmodpack that was popular for a few weeks. We didn't know any programming and it was basically just number tweaking and if there was a crash you would start from scratch. There was one older guy we know from an MMO we played who developed a "bananabomb" for us, and I wish we would have had more time to be mentored by him, but he was quite busy with a developer dayjob. From that experience we felt like programming was just some magic behind the curtains, something out of reach, something we couldn't do. 10 years later after I went to UNI and learned Hello world it all clicked and felt so simple. Why didn't anyone teach me/tell me how to learn the very very basics for 23 years? Why didn't I just google it? I don't know, but I think a mentor would have helped! I don't regret the path I took to where I am now, but occasionally wonder what if.

It's really clear to me that short feedback loops and visual output are what make programming accessible.

In middle school I was in the most advanced computer class offered. It involved lots and lots of typing practice and basically just doing office-work projects in random Mac programs. My biggest regret was that the promised "programming" lessons consisted of typing printed Java code from a piece of paper and into a text file. No explanation of what the symbols were, what Java was, nothing. I was pissed. I failed that module. I felt so misled that I flat out refused to do the assignments.

From then on I resolved to teach myself. I somehow convinced my mom to buy us a computer. Once we got dial-up, I struggled with VBA, Flash Actionscript, C++, Tcl, Python and on and on. None of it had a manageable learning curve for me.

One day, I discovered Game Maker. The day Mark Overmars introduced the C++/JS mash-up that is Game Maker Language changed my life. I learned how to plan projects, how to invoke spells of hyperfocus, how to read technical documentation and on and on. It taught me algebra concepts way before I knew what algebra even was. That was all possible because I could type some stuff into the editor, and within a few minutes, actually see sprites move around and respond to my input.

Damn. It's been 20 years. I feel like I should be a coding God now. It's funny because I don't expect myself to be Shakespeare just because I've been writing words my whole life... Anyways, my mind wanders.

Oh, tutors. I never had a tutor. If you want to make your kid a genius, get them a 1:1 tutor. That provides social modeling, mentorship, immediate feedback and personalized lessons. I would venture to say that tutors may still be valuable, even to adults...

"Damn. It's been 20 years. I feel like I should be a coding God now. It's funny because I don't expect myself to be Shakespeare just because I've been writing words my whole life..."

Thats actually a good point, why do we have this assumption in tech?

I think some people can actually achieve continual improvement if they can master reflective/deliberate practice. I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what the discrete components of my coding are. Do I judge my functions, files, PRs?

In writing this comment, I think doing a short code review of what I produced in the last session might make sense. The more quickly I advance at some skill, the more quickly I can add/tweak my code review.

From my understanding and experience, that sort of reflection on each output of skillful work turbo charges improvement. I did it at a phone center job, where I kept a spreadsheet with a prediction of what service rating the customer would give me, and a short blurb of what I did well and what I could improve. That seriously blasted me to the top. This also worked when I was in a band. When rehearsing, we would play through our set in full while recording, then afterwards we would immediately run to the computer to listen back and discuss what to work on. Within weeks we were able to meet our goal of playing with our main influence, a band called Protomartyr.

> I really wish our primary education had any other IT classes than learning powerpoints, emails and making those funky 3D titles in word(I think this might be changing?).

In the US there's definitely a big effort to have CS/programming courses in high schools but the big problem is finding qualified teachers. Since teachers in the US tend to get paid much less than even low-end software developer jobs in the same city, most people with any CS skill tend to go into the software industry instead of teaching.

I really want to be a teacher. I cannot, in good faith to my family, lower their standard of living to the point where we could afford for me to be one. A 1st year teacher where I am makes about 60% of my current salary, and that was true even before I switched over to software. My first job out of college as a mechanical engineer, I made ~$60k a year, equivalent to roughly $70k nowadays. A new high school teacher in Texas makes about $50k in my area. The difference is that, in a decade, my salary doubled; theirs went up by about 10%.

I would take a pay cut to work as a teacher, especially for the ~70 working days off, which is about triple what I have now. A 50% cut isn't feasible though.

> I REALLY wanted to learn languages like C when I was a kid but it was just NOT happening. I was starting from nothing, borrowing library books I couldn't even remotely make sense of.

Depending on what "as a kid" means and your age, did you not try to find such people on internet forums dedicated to (for example) C? I also wanted to learn C when I was a child and did so with those resources (as well as books, which were as impenetrable back then as you already indicated).

For many of us internet wasn't available until middle teenage and then it was first only available on a few select machines on the school. I only realized forums existed sometime after I was 21. And I am born in the eighties

We had (limited) internet very early and it is easy to forget not everyone did.

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