Hello, all,
It’s been nice to read how people are feeling more confident with their coding and how they feel like they’re making progress. While it was also cool to understand how the code was working on Thursday, even if I don’t quite get what APIs are yet, I generally feel like I’m having an imaginative crisis when it comes to code. This latest section of the Python Codecademy tutorials (Practice Makes Perfect) is taking me much, much longer to complete now that I have to come up with solutions on my own. That should be expected, but I find myself just staring at Codecademy for an unproductive while before turning to Google to look at how other people have solved the problems (and I don’t like that).
Also, I was hopelessly blank in the workshop. I wanted to push the code and do something interesting and provocative. Instead, I just tweaked the code to tweet out an incomplete first chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I would have felt better about that if I could have written code that reformatted the plain text into lines of 140 characters, but I just tweeted the first 130 characters of a line/paragraph from Notepad. Maybe I’m just having an extended personal moment, but it feels like I’m lagging behind now when I felt that all of us mostly started on the same footing at the beginning of the semester.
I know that code can do cool things, but I’m worried that I can’t do those cool things.
You definitely should take solace in the fact that I, too, was banging my head against the walls in frustration trying to figure out the “practice makes perfect” tutorials, and I also used the Q&A tool on the website to solve almost all of them. A few I had a general idea how to do, but then when I tried them I got errors that I didn’t understand and then moved on to the Q & A to try and find solutions. Don’t worry about it! I think I just felt good to see some code I slightly modified do something in the “real world,” and not just within a teaching website. Fear not! You’re not alone, and you’re probably learning more than you think. Hang in there! With practice, we’ll all get better at this 🙂
I can also empathize with you! I have also experienced an “imaginative crisis” or two over the past few weeks and have felt incredibly discouraged at times.