
Ask HN: Things New Developers Struggle with Most? - jjensen90
Hi HN! I am developing some educational materials based around programming&#x2F;web development (PHP, Java, language agnostic concepts) and I am wondering what your personal experiences have been regarding the concepts&#x2F;topics&#x2F;workflows that are most challenging to new (or even intermediate) developers. These could be struggles you&#x27;ve personally had, or difficulties you&#x27;ve seen while mentoring or pair programming.<p>I want the curriculum I design to directly solve real problems that developers face, rather than be based on my own single subjective experiences&#x2F;personal bias. I think aggregating a list of these topics might not only be selfishly beneficial for my project, but might be a good resource for a new programmer who can see what challenges they might face (and more importantly, that those challenges can be overcome!).
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solipsism
Building an accurate mental model of a typical web request is important and
sometimes tricky. You mention both PHP and Java. I'm not sure how you're
planning on teaching both of these, but using each to build a web app has
different implications from the other regarding how/when/by what your code
gets called. Adding JavaScript makes it even more complex.

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jjensen90
Thanks for your answer; that is a great point about the mental model of a web
request. I mention PHP and Java because I have experience in web development
in both languages, but my training materials would have completely separate
tracts for each language.

Essentially I would like to target non-academically trained beginners who want
practical/actionable knowledge in the respective language. So my basic outline
would be: installing the language, choosing/installing an IDE, setting up a
simple web server, language basics, OOP, database interaction, front-end
rendering, etc. The reason for this Ask HN is that I would hate to waste extra
time on something that 90% of students will grasp immediately, at the expense
of a topic that might need extra attention.

