(sketch) i'm late, i'm late
My partner and I had lunch with a friend a few days ago. He's a senior engineer and damn good at it. As always, I speak some mix of English and Mandarin with my partner.
Now, my friend has spent some time studying Mandarin and is able to pick up plenty of phrases, but he laments how hard Mandarin is with its many many homonyms.
I thought, immediately, of how hard it is for me to code -- and to learn to code. My friend can scan lines of code and understand its gist while I'm still on the second line reading it bit by bit out loud and repeating myself.
The key is practice. There is no coding gene. Even for folks with aptitude or unusual talent in mathematics or memory, programming is vast with many syntaxes, use cases, and continuous change. It's true: experienced programmers have the prior knowledge and confidence to learn new programming skills more readily than n00bs like me. The key is practice.
It's true for big O time complexity calculations. It's true for Dr. Li Fei Fei. It's true for sustaining a career as a teacher.
I'm now on my second pass through of the [Structy](tab: https://www.structy.net) algorithm curriculum. The cognitive load is less this time. I can map and outline out the approach better:
I can use the debugger and print statements better. I don't struggle as much with placing break points or print statements.
The key is practice--and I have so much more to go.