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So I've recently surpassed the "basics" of learning programming (been using C#) and I've now been taking my knowledge and getting creative by making all kinds of cool little apps - from web browsers to gag joke apps, to apps that monitor system performance information... I've really gotten "hands on" with coding now and mostly the challenges I face come up when I write my programs trying to figure out logic and debug and also trying to discover new functions/methods and APIs...
Speaking of APIs and libraries (namespaces, etc...), I've noticed they are an entire different learning curve. Not only must one know the actual language, but he or she must also have a working knowledge of APIs and libraries or else the language knowledge won't mean anything.
Anyway, so I want your input on learning and growing as a coder... I have more patience for coding than I do anything else in my life. I will literally sit for like 12 hours if I have to just to get something worked out. I can't say that about anything else. However, there are certain logic issues that I run into that take me like 2-4 HOURS to solve at times, and sometimes the problem is painfully simple, I just couldn't see it to begin with.
Is this pretty typical for a new coder or coders in general? I don't have a ton of experience being around other new coders so sometimes I wonder if that's normal or if I'm just a wreck.
It's pretty easy for me to follow along in coding books and watch tutorials on Udemy and YouTube and understand everything, even when it comes to so-called "advanced" concepts. However, it's when I put all that stuff away and it's between me and Visual Studio that sometimes I get stuck... And sometimes I don't want to quit and I will stay up all night trying to figure out what ends up being a simple problem that can be fixed in a line or two of code.
I figure this is how the job probably really is, except with much more advanced problems. However, I do still enjoy coding. It's fun to work out the bugs. Your advice/insight is appreciated. Thanks.
P.S. Is there any standardized way to improve at debugging? I'm still trying to learn my way around the VS debugger.
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I think you are going the right direction. Just keep learning from the mistakes. 
<sig notetoself="think of a better signature">
<first>Jim</first> <last>Meadors</last>
</sig>
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: Is there any standardized way to improve at debugging?
Knowing your tools and getting your hands dirty.
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: that take me like 2-4 HOURS to solve at times
This can be normal and in professional environments it can be quite longer. However I would also like to add an anecdote from my past experience:
I was coding on an application containing a matrix of results and somehow the results where one of in this case, correct in the other and again wrong in a third case. After 13 hours of straight programming the letters on my screen started to turn green and started to move around. My queue to stop working (it was 21:30 and I still had to go home). The next day I came in and started working again. It took me literally less than 5 minutes to solve the problem.
Moral of the story: Dare to put a problem on the side, focus on something else and come back again later.
Keep up the enthusiasm 
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Go out-side step away from the code for a few minutes, explain the problem to someone, that someone can be a photo of Bill gates or your favorite bear or a real person who could actually help.
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So many times have I started to explain a problem to someone and almost instantly figured it out as I was explaining the problem. I've known people who have completely scoffed off "rubber duck decoding" but it tends to work so well for me.
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Never underestimate the power of the subconscious.
While you are walking the dog, enjoying a brewskie or lying in your bath the brain is still working away. When you come back to the problem it seems a lot simpler.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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This is so true.
It's easy to get stubborn and not want the problem to defeat you, so you stick at it for hours, only to wake up the next day and the solution literally just pops into your head.
Also, the other points people have made about talking the problem over OUT LOUD, with either a person or by yourself. That works wonders too. Something about being forced to express the problem clearly - such that someone else can understand where you're at - frequently unblocks the issue in your mind and the solution presents itself.
"And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being!"
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What you will ideally need is a tutor.
That is someone who is a skilled developer and wouldn't mind occasionally have a look at your problem...
I think there is a tutoring program on CodeProject (with volunteers..) give it a go sometimes, who knows?
(I never did, so I don't...  )
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Ha yes, that's the word! 
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You're doing the right things, so you should improve over time as the skills of design and debugging become more practiced.
It's often difficult to work out where to start on a complex problem, so sitting there for 2-4 hours isn't unusual: I've spent most of a week working out what to do before I've even fired up the editor (or Visual Studio). Sometimes that "thinking time" is the most important part of the project!
A couple of suggestions:
1) As has been mentioned, take breaks. I try to stop what I'm doing at least once an hour and do something totally different, as it "recharges my creative batteries" and stops me getting stale.
2) Never be afraid to say "this isn't working" and throw away an idea just because you have put effort into it. It's one of the hardest things to do, but sometimes we have to say to ourselves "this isn't going to work", or "that was a bad idea", even if we've coded most of it... 
3) Practice. Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. And then practice some more! Development and debugging are both skills, and like all skills they only ever get better when you use them. Learn the basics of the VS debugger, and use them - ignore the complicated stuff for now - it's a "mind set" you need to develop, not an intimate knowledge of arcane debugging commands. Basic breakpointing, stepping into, stepping over, looking at variable contents is 99.99% of all I do with the debugger. It's also worth logging info (either to a log file, or the console) as that can give you a better "feel" for how code is running.
Keep at it - you seem to be doing pretty well so far! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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You remind me that I learned the existance of "set next statement" after 3.5 years of developing. All in VS. With complex problems ranging from hardware management to layered integration of Sobel transforms with heuristic detection of patterns.
And that the first 3 months I didn't know how to use the debugger effectively and debugget with prints. Image processing. With prints.
As I say, I know nothing about computers. Beacuse each time I think of what I knew two years ago I end up saying "I didn't know anything back then". Since it happened regularly in the past 20 years I can predict that two years from now I'll be looking back and saying that now I know nothing about computers, so I accept it as of now.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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I would add only one thing to all the good advises... Choose pet project, that seems to be hard... That will force you to learn new things every day...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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In my experience the type of "technical learning" necessary for programming skills in a given OS and "stack" varies from person to person; of course it varies by general cognitive abilities in dealing with logic and abstractions, symbol and semantics, but, there is, also, imho, a kind of "innate" cognitive style which is quite "individual."
Some folks, in my experience, are endowed with strength at learning from "the top down" ... from abstraction at a high-level to "nitty-gritty," from algorithm to code: give them a set of Backus-Naur diagrams and they can visualize how those abstractions "work" in a "real world" computer language as a dynamic set of parsing/object-construction, etc., "rules."
Other folks, like me, in contrast, are "bottom up" learners who learn best by making multiple passes over the high-level concepts and forma structure in the context of focusing on some specific technique, or problem to solve, most often while experimenting/prototyping. I believe this type of learner tends to need a lot of "hands-on" before they can form an accurate "mental model" of how the high-level abstractions and concepts "work" in the code.
I do believe that intense periods of all-out effort, total immersion, in learning are very valuable; at the same time, I believe it is an important skill to develop to know when (as in your example where the screen starts dancing) that you are over-loaded mentally, and the ratio of effort to learning turns negative.
A phenomenon I have noticed in myself, and others, is a kind of "carry-forward" from the first language/stack one learns in depth to your future learning new languages/stacks. For me, the first really deep-dive was with Lisp, and then, PostScript, and I find myself thinking, sometimes, that I wish .NET had the kind of "dictionary stack" to govern current semantic state, and other save/restore-state mechanisms, like the 'gsave/grestore graphic-state semantics, that PostScript has 
If you accept the premise of a tendency for learning in "bottom up" vs. "top down" style, and a connection with the general cognitive style of a person, then, from an educational point of view ... what follows ?
I'd say the strong "bottom upper" at times need to engage in intensive immersion in the higher-level abstractions, in the structure, semantics, algorithms, design-patterns. And, I'd say the strong "top downer" needs to "get their hands dirty," and work with lower-level idiosyncratic features, like dealing with the quirks of the UI Controls that .NET provides in WinForms, WPF, ASP.Net, etc.; like manipulation of bit-maps, using API calls to "fill in the gaps" where the front-end of the stack doesn't provide the functionality you need.
I see nothing wrong with reaching mastery of how to find what you need in the documentation as you need it ... without an accurate "mental model" and understanding of the micro-aspects of that topic's state/behavior paradigm. In my experience with teaching programming, the person who behaves/feels (most often compulsively) like they "understand nothing" unless they "understand everything" is in deep trouble, and needs being "brought to earth" ... gently
Perhaps there is an opposite to that hypothetical "syndrome" where a person may feel over-confident because they can make code that "works," without realizing that they have not accumulated the type of higher-level knowledge that allows them to generalize from their current achievements to other problem areas ?
When I hear someone say, like you did, that you really enjoy getting "deep" into programming: well, I think that is absolutely great !
Oh, I didn't mean to go on like this ...
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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Excellent post!
I'm top-down AND bottom-up. I do best when I start with a high level view of the subject and dig into the theory. This gives me a visualization of what I'm dealing with, including rough parameters.
Then I get my hands dirty, digging into the details and building little pieces, and grouping them into bigger pieces. I have to have the hands-on work to truly learn anything (maybe everyone does to some extent).
The initial picture is always full of holes. There are too many details left out by verbal descriptions. The hands-on work fills in those gaps and corrects misperceptions.
When learning a new language I build an address book application. I've had the same data model since 1991 and know the requirements inside-n-out. This lets me focus on building an application, from data access layer to GUI.
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Quote: P.S. Is there any standardized way to improve at debugging? I'm still trying to learn my way around the VS debugger.
not really, has has been said before - practice .. that being said, when I started out in 'c' etc, command-line stuff on a Unix platform, all we had was 'printf', none of this fancy IDE stuff .. so, I'd suggest, for my 0.02 worth
a) learn how to step through a program looking at variables etc, setting breakpoints
b) learn a logging framework - log4net or similar - avoid printf("At step 1, value of x is ....") throughout your code
c) look at techniques of 'incremental' building of programs/solving problems - test the basic algorithms/classes etc with unit tests etc that way you can be sure your 'base'/foundation is firm before you proceed
d) wether you use command-line or Atlassian SourceTree or GitKraken, as you develop bigger programs, use source control - sure, when you start out, you backup important files/directories as date/time stamped zip files, yes ? but 'rolling back' from these if you mess something up is a pain - so learn and like a Source Control System
above all - read voraciously, have a thirst for knowledge - its not necessarily about the language/framework, its about being able to break problems/issues down into solvable chunks and then modelling them
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Experience, experience, experience.
It's over 4 years I program full time and before that I did all kind of microprojects - I still bang my head on some "simple" problems.
The best way to avoid long fruitless hours is to invest time in designing what you want to achieve and the structure of what you're building. That streamlines and divides the problems into smaller ones that can be tackled more easily. Also keep in mind that you may have to redesing one thing several times and recognize it after long coding hours - how to improve at that? Wasting time. Doing things less than optimal.
With time you'll know what worked and what not and you'll be able to work faster. It takes a year to make a year of experience, there are no shortcuts.
Just don't ever think you have nothing to improve or learn, keep your mind open and be ready to acknowledge when you did suboptimal things. It happens.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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I agree, good design can make a massive difference. Invest time in learning design patterns, that will save hours of debug/code time later.
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I'll add a couple of other things I have found invaluable over the years.
Another set of eyes. Because you are so close to the code you can end up seeing what you expect to see, having someone else look at a problem has often identified an error that I just can't see no matter hown long I look at it.
Another developer you can talk the problem over with. Often as you try and explain the problem to your colleague you can solve the issue without the other person needing to say a word. This can really weird some people out but it does work.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Another developer you can talk the problem over with. Often as you try and explain the problem to your colleague you can solve the issue without the other person needing to say a word. This can really weird some people out but it does work.
Tested and true. Absolutely invaluable.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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Agreed. My cat is an excellent problem solver in this way. 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I would not trust a cat needs you to solve a problem
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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You'd be surprised: they are pretty good, because they have a way of staring right at you with an expression of "So? Do I care?" all the damn time that makes you doubt what you are saying is important or relevant. And that leads you to doubt what you believe is right...which helps you go  and realize where you went wrong!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I've used Griff's "ask the cat" strategy many times with great success.
A typical "cat programming" session might go something like "Okay, Mog, check this - for some reason this binding doesn't work even though x, y and z are all in place and I know that event gets fired and the dependency is there and that's always going to work unless ... unless ... of course! God! I'm an idiot, why didn't I think of that? Mog, your a genius! Have a kitty treat!"
It's not, needless to say, that the cat provides the answer but that you find yourself restating the problem in a slightly different way - it also helps that you're not physically looking at the code. When you look too hard at code, it's easy to go in circles.
I often find that I'll wake up in the morning with a solution to something that seemed utterly impenetrable the day before. Overnight, you subconsciously reframe the problem and then the solution becomes obvious in a way that just doesn't happen if you chain yourself to your desk.
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