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General Discussion

Posted by benyoungblood
benyoungblood
10,062 Points

Any advice or encouragement for pressing on?

Hello Treehouse friends! I'm calling out a mayday. I've been learning programming, mainly JavaScript, for the past 4 months. It has been going well, I've actually developed a few cool little apps. I got really comfortable with where I was so I decided to press on. I went through Basics of JQuery, Ajax, and now finishing up object-oriented JavaScript.

I just jumped in my text editor to build out a basic ToDo app for fun and to refresh myself. It's almost like I've forgotten random essential parts about loops, appending, event listeners, functions, etc...I'm extremely bummed out and I feel like giving up.

I'm extremely passionate about programming and I want to make a career change; but I'm struggling to retain the basics for some reason when I start studying the more advanced side.

Does that even make sense?

2 Answers

Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points
Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points

Hi,

I forget roughly 99% of everything I learn and sometimes intentionally. But, the 1% that I make sure to retain in memory is where I placed my notes or key phrases to google in order to pull up the missing 99%.

Programmers who know a lot are really just professional googlers.

The key to increasing the brains capacity to retain and use information is by using the brains of others.

Chin up

Michael Prasad
Michael Prasad
793 Points
Michael Prasad
Michael Prasad
793 Points

Create a cheatsheet with examples of the main stuff you mentioned you forget and use it to write your own projects large or small. Something like this might help: https://htmlcheatsheet.com/js/

The problem you have is from learning off of videos like what is on this and other sites. They tell you what to do and you just copy it so you don't really learn it. In college you learn very little from the instructor but learn mostly from grinding through projects staying up late at night. The type of training here only gives a foundation you need to build on with practice.

The type of training you get online really lacks projects like in a college course.

You can try to do daily code challenges like what is at sites like this: https://www.topcoder.com/challenges/?pageIndex=1

benyoungblood
benyoungblood
10,062 Points

Thank you Michael! I agree with that. I did coding projects on my own at first, but as I got into the more advanced pieces, it felt like treehouse started moving super fast and I couldn't keep up. I'll check out the website link you gave me and work on documenting the area I'm weaker in. Really good advice!