How I learnt to code in one year | Hacker News Reader

How I learnt to code in one year

davidbauer.ch

16 pointsNathandim8 comments

>Learning 1: Set a goal and talk about it. You’ll need the pressure.

In fact, there is compelling evidence that the opposite is true: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se...

The long and short of it is that if you tell other people about your intention to accomplish something in advance, you get to pat yourself on the back without actually achieving anything. This apparently reduces your motivation to follow up on the commitment because you've already reaped the reward.

> "This apparently reduces your motivation to follow up on the commitment because you've already reaped the reward."

That's not universally true. Also, having skimmed the paper, that's not quite what the authors state.

To quote the paper "...participants felt closer to the identity goal of becoming a jurist when their behavioral intentions were recognized than when those intentions remained private." This says nothing about motivation and in fact motivation (or even actual work) was not at all examined in this study. For all we know, those students did go on to do better or "... read law periodicals regularly" as they said they would.

When teaching first year undergrads they would always complain that they couldn't see the application of what they were learning. It's interesting that this older student had the same reaction ("things I would have done differently had I known what I know now... Worry less about the fact that most exercises have no obvious relation to journalism.")

I guess that common in learning anything -- you have to get the fundamentals down but you probably can't appreciate them till you've mastered more of the subject.

Also interesting that Treehouse didn't work for him. If I was Ryan Carson I'd be a bit worried about this. Can anyone comment on the differences between CodeAcademy and Treehouse?

Codecademy is free. I have been doing some lot's of codecademy exercises on HTML,CSS, Javascript and learnt solid basics of web desing/developemet but I have a CS degree so I knew how to program before but more theoretical computing(math problems in C and Java, Matlab). I wasn't really doing anything practical before.

Let other write more about Treehouse vs Codecademy.

I'm using Treehouse currently to learn how to make apps for Android and it's coming a long great. I work full time (not a coder), married with a kid on the way, so I don't get the chance to work on it as much as I like. For me I feel it works as I can see the instructor code an example on the video, and many things he repeats throughout the video. They also link notes into their lessons and links to other sites, have blog entries about Android and they have a forum for asking questions, that they respond to.

My only previous experience is HTML5/CSS.

I've tried Codeacademy when it first came out, but found it dull. Maybe cause it's about Javascript and not what I wanted to learn exactly (Android development).

First and foremost I have used both products and enjoyed them both. To be honest Team Treehouse is great it really is but yes it does feel like you could pass the quizzes without really knowing anything. That being said their content was excellent but I wish they had more advanced topics. Soon enough though they are going to start getting into command line and the advanced parts of CSS(see here http://teamtreehouse.com/roadmap). Codeacademy on the other hand made it impossible to move forward without really knowing the material. Problem with Codeacademy though was it's lack of material. It only covers a few things at the current time relative to Team Treehouse.

So you learned to "code"? Next goal: become a software developer.

And after that, try to understand some algorithms and data structures. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com