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Alexandru Olteanu
Alexandru Olteanu
17,522 Points

A little discouraging?

Hi,

First of all, don't get me wrong. I enjoy watching the treehouse staff talking about their beginnings, but I can't help but feel like I am far behind them.

Most have begun programming at an young age while I started just less than one year ago.

What can I do to make myself learn/progress faster?

Thanks!

6 Answers

Calvin Nix
Calvin Nix
43,828 Points

Hey Alexandru,

Personally, the way that I learn to program faster is to start creating things. It is amazing how much you retain when you face real life scenarios on how to overcome problems.

An approach that I like to take towards the treehouse tracks is I try to create the project after watching the video for the project overview. This at least put me in a mind-set of attempting to think through a project, even if I have no clue on how to accomplish the task.

Reuben Varzea
Reuben Varzea
23,182 Points

Agree 100% with Calvin Nix - you can watch videos, and run through a tutorial all you want, but if you don't actually try to apply them by coding up personal projects (and failing, researching, and fixing your bugs), it will be slow going.

Ronny Ewanek
Ronny Ewanek
4,385 Points

Fact of the matter is that you/me are behind! Haha, but what I'm doing is creating a personal website about anything and everything. For example I'm going to use a picture of my living room as a background that I modified on Photoshop (treehouse lesson), and am using Wordpress (lesson) with Boostrap (lesson). If you don't have any work, just make things up! Build it on a local server (lesson) and then it's completely free.

Alexandru Olteanu
Alexandru Olteanu
17,522 Points

Thanks, Calvin! That makes sense. I'll start thinking of some personaj projects or spinoffs that I could do.

Calvin Nix
Calvin Nix
43,828 Points

Exactly! Spinoffs are perfect because you can even reference the project you created with the teacher whenever you have trouble.

Ashlynn Pai
Ashlynn Pai
11,679 Points

I know! It seems so many people in this field started in preschool!

I like to think that the learning curve keeps flattening as you go, just as with anything else. Once you hit a certain part of the curve, you can do the work competently and even pass people who have been at it longer. Tech is wonderful for this.

Alexandru Olteanu
Alexandru Olteanu
17,522 Points

Yeah, I think so too. Only time and practice will tell, although I would like being an expert web developer right now, haha.

Brian Ball
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Brian Ball
Treehouse Project Reviewer

Fours years later, this post still reaches out to me. I've started coding about 5 months ago with Treehouse. It's been great but super fast. There is so much content I'm learning while on the Full Stack JS track. I've started working on side projects to just cement concepts.

If you see this, I wonder how you would react to this post 4 years later?