Teaching programming: 1 - Motivation
I’ve been against Macintosh company lately. They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things. With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.
“That’s the problem with a lot of people - they don’t try to do stuff that’s never been done before, so they never do anything, but if they try to do it, they find out there’s lots of things they can do that have never been done before.”
‒ Russell Kirsch (he built the world's first internally programmable computer), https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34113123
“In fact, I’ve done lots of things that haven’t been done before”, he said half-smiling.
‒ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/
I’ve always believed that nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. Most people think the opposite – that all things are withheld from them which they have conceived to do and they end up doing nothing.
‒ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
— Ira Glass, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34816145
Welcome to the FFmpeg School of Assembly Language. You have taken the first step on the most interesting, challenging, and rewarding journey in programming. These lessons will give you a grounding in the way assembly language is written in FFmpeg and open your eyes to what's actually going on in your computer.
-- https://github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lessons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940485)
That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jobs much easier. I don't think that I'm better than our in-house IT folks at software development but that my perspective as an actual end-user gives me a much better idea of how to meet our own needs. I'm also highly motivated to make it effective, since I'll be using it. So, the title initially resonated with me and didn't see this comment coming. That said, I'm sure your point is valid in many cases as I'm not familiar with formal software development / project management.