

How I learnt to code in one year - Nathandim
http://www.davidbauer.ch/2013/01/25/how-i-learnt-to-code-in-one-year/

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mistercow
>Learning 1: Set a goal and talk about it. You’ll need the pressure.

In fact, there is compelling evidence that the opposite is true:
[http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se...](http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf)

The long and short of it is that if you tell other people about your intention
to accomplish something in advance, you get to pat yourself on the back
without actually achieving anything. This apparently _reduces_ your motivation
to follow up on the commitment because you've already reaped the reward.

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amirmc
> _"This apparently reduces your motivation to follow up on the commitment
> because you've already reaped the reward."_

That's not universally true. Also, having skimmed the paper, that's not quite
what the authors state.

To quote the paper _"...participants felt closer to the identity goal of
becoming a jurist when their behavioral intentions were recognized than when
those intentions remained private."_ This says nothing about motivation and in
fact motivation (or even actual work) was not at all examined in this study.
For all we know, those students _did_ go on to do better or "... read law
periodicals regularly" as they said they would.

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noelwelsh
When teaching first year undergrads they would always complain that they
couldn't see the application of what they were learning. It's interesting that
this older student had the same reaction ("things I would have done
differently had I known what I know now... Worry less about the fact that most
exercises have no obvious relation to journalism.")

I guess that common in learning anything -- you have to get the fundamentals
down but you probably can't appreciate them till you've mastered more of the
subject.

Also interesting that Treehouse didn't work for him. If I was Ryan Carson I'd
be a bit worried about this. Can anyone comment on the differences between
CodeAcademy and Treehouse?

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QuantumGuy
First and foremost I have used both products and enjoyed them both. To be
honest Team Treehouse is great it really is but yes it does feel like you
could pass the quizzes without really knowing anything. That being said their
content was excellent but I wish they had more advanced topics. Soon enough
though they are going to start getting into command line and the advanced
parts of CSS(see here <http://teamtreehouse.com/roadmap>). Codeacademy on the
other hand made it impossible to move forward without really knowing the
material. Problem with Codeacademy though was it's lack of material. It only
covers a few things at the current time relative to Team Treehouse.

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ExpiredLink
So you learned to "code"? Next goal: become a software developer.

~~~
lignuist
And after that, try to understand some algorithms and data structures. :)

