4 myths about coding you ought to know as a beginner

Regardless of what you read on the Internet, learning to code is a difficult journey. I feel I made incredible mental progress (and went through lots of late nights and sacrificed lots of time for stupid movies) just jumping from "Hello world" to recursion to object oriented programming within the last few months in my CS Intro class. In addition, even if you're super smart, how you learn to code also affects your pace too. Do you have a mentor or do you work on your own and only run to your programmer friends when needed? Do you rely on remote pair programming?  Do you learn to code full-time or part-time? There's a reason why CS grads still have an advantage over non CS grads even when so many tutorials are available for free and short-term boot camps spams your mail 5 times a day: it pays to just learn code for four years and have an army of professors and tutors when you start out. It's very different from reading an online tutorial and getting checks for watching 5 minutes of a lecture.

Maybe you're a marketer or designer or journalist learning to code. You take a class, thinking I'll be making smart conversations with engineers from now on. Can't be further from truth. The body of CS is so great that you'll still likely face a ton of trouble conversing with programmers at a deeper level about any issue. I'm interested in business but I know I'm far from confident enough to do things like hire programmers for a company despite getting a good grade in 6.001x. Again, it takes a lot of time to grasp CS concepts even just an intuitive level.  

Perhaps coding is still largely a haven for the nerdy introverted awkward kids. You may have heard things have changed so much these days due to the popularity of pair programming and teamwork in software groups. But social interaction begins much earlier than that. I realized that when I started the first few CS lessons, I felt a very urgent need to reach out to a someone technical so I can ask questions (which can be really dumb at times) or maybe just tell them what I'm doing. I know there's StackOverflow and all that but it doesn't beat having someone knowing you are struggling to learn foreign concepts and they'll be so much more interactive!

4. There's a linear route towards becoming an engineer

This is just like there's no linear route for anything. You saw someone going to school for four years and become a programmer. Someone may just rack up on tutorials and free online classes before he/she scores that first start-up gig. Well, it's at least "linear" in concept. You soon realize that in CS there are so many ways to achieve the same goal. You can use different languages, implement things differently and yet still get the same outcome. That's great but what that means is figuring out which way to take and what to learn often tend to manifest themselves as trial-and-error. There are no tutorials or curricula right for everybody. That said I'd still recommend free sites such as Free Code Camp or The Odin Project. But even those sites won't give you enough handholding to become a very good engineer. Be strategic about what you learn, but don't forget to maintain the beginner's curious mind.