My story of programming learning

Various kinds of thoughts came to me these days, hope write them down may help.

Brief background

born after 85,  cs-unrelated major

6 yrs after graduate, no IT related working experience

You may wonder what the heck this blog is talking about, and why it's in English instead of Chinese.

The reason will show itself shortly, and let me get down to business at this moment.

After writing down the above brief background description, I was shocked somehow, is that me?  the very person who want to learn programming and have the idea of making his own living on that skill. Maybe in other people's view, I am just escaping, I am the person who have no idea what he want and find a buzz word, IT or programmer, then run after it. Sadly, I have to admit somehow they are right. But it is not the very first reason why I start learning programming. In my opinion, I am bound to this way, one way or the other.

Think back 2 years ago, I was working in a private company, six staff in all and not much to do everyday. Sitting on the chair, facing the blank screen, I decided to learn something. Maybe there is a saying goes like that, even the old dog needs some new tricks. Living in a magical city like Shanghai, it will be no wonder the idea of learning came to me even if I were a nit. The parents here, especially those who got the title in recent 10 years have unprecedented enthusiasm on children's education. It's hard to say their child is luck or not when they got the chance of learning so much things like foreign languages, swimming,  drawing, logic thinking, Olympic math, and various kinds of musical instruments on weekdays, and weekends. Such tendency means one thing to me, I would be weed out if I have nothing useful to offer in the near future.

Then the first thing I do is, asking myself what I want to do which I am not able to at that moment. When it come to the goal of learning, I always prefer putting on the pragmatic hat, my logic is, if I have much chance of using that skill, I will learn it. More often than not, the more I learn, the more I would be interested in it, finally the virtuous circle goes.

Just like so many people in the city, I begin my English study. Not like them, I decide to learn by myself, and my goal is be able to read and talk in a native way. Such a goal may require a much longer time than just enroll in a class then get a certificate. I believed in my way of learning by doing. Though it's easier said than done. Much efforts omitted here, and finally I have reached a mile-stone after 2 years efforts, reading over 100 original English books and 20 audio books. I can still recall the scene the first month I tried to read, four pages per hour, more than eight hours by day. Nowadays, it all can be done in 2-3 hours. And an-hour's audio episode would require 5 day-to-day rewind in order for me to get the details of the story, it's more likely to be done in two times today. 

The point is, I have somehow required the skill in my own way. There is no surprise in those 100 English books I have read, some of them are about entrepreneurship, like The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Zero to One,  "Steve Jobs". Most of them are about IT, so the magic word sank in. And it's time to learn some new tricks. Whether I can learn programming just like learning English, I ask myself. Plus, it is so cool if I can programming. I have heard that many super hackers are self-taught and they are wickedly smart. With my new skill in hand, I figure it could be quite a treat to read programming books, for there are many classic ones written in English, and all those programming language are in English, right ? I have tried some stuff. First python, I have heard it is lean and easy to use compared with other programming language, and people could do many useful stuff like Crawler and machine learning. Then, if you want to make a website, javascript is preferred. C++ is harder to handle, so pass. Finally java came into my view, I find the book thinking in java (haven't finished that though). Everything is a object, the perfect mapping of the world. It made me believe it is possible to make a new world using this language and it is popular, which mean learning materials are easy to get. It seems about 1 year passed after the first time I printed "hello world" on the screen in python. Still, the only stuff I am able to do now is imitate other's work. But it is not to say programming is useless. I have written some macro in VB using excel VBA which my colleagues use everyday and they think I am a super hacker.. LOL... only I myself knows how silly the joke is, I just try to figure out the right trick to the problem and paste the it from baidu. But one thing is true, I could not have done all these if I have not tried to learn programming in the first place. I have not touched VB before, but it is just plain to write in VBA when you have some idea of how other programming language works. It gave me a taste of how powerful programming could be, daily manual work could be done with my small macro on a single click, 20 times more efficient.

True, I could spend hours after hours to figure out a problem thousands of other people have done before. Many times I would ask myself, whether it is the "right" thing to do with my time, for those simple problems seems so hard to me, it could simply means I am not the right person to figure them out. And not like my English learning, programming needs more hands-on practice, it is not likely to require this skill by simply reading books on and on. When facing the blank IDE, it all came to me how hard programming could be. Still, I am not willing to give up right now, I have the dream of doing more useful stuff with my skills and efforts. I believed and still believe in programming is the right tool to do it. Even though the road is bumpy, could be suffering, the wonderful view along the way is well worth the effort.