Attitude for dealing with errors

Cognition: errors are my friends

I am learning to program for the first time, and I sometimes feel like I am so lost. I feel this "programming" especially has special difficulty in learning. Programmers would know what I mean by special difficulty. This difficulty is somewhat different from what I could feel from other subjects. It is very frustrating, as I feel like I can't find the answer and am lost.

 

Even when I am only following the normal tutorials from Youtube or Google search results, I constantly get errors that I don't even know any clue about.

 

This was a very frustrating experience and I could see why programmers are so highly paid and treated well in the job market.

 

However, as I was working to figure out trying to make a blog on my own, following a tutorial on the internet, I again encountered an error monster I could not really handle. I was copying and pasting the error statement with a thwarted mind as I always have been when encountering an error message.

 

I treated these error messages as if they are my enemies, but then, I changed my perspective on how I should look at those error messages.

 

They are my teacher.
They are trying to teach me where to go.
They are my compass.

With this thought, finally realized that errors are really my friends and tutors, and the wisdom of the elders, that could take me to where I want to be.

 

 

 

The attitude of finding the answer

I don't really try to write a long article about my thought on the process of learning, but because I felt this finding to be really useful and something that should be really well-remembered, I am writing this article about how we should deal with the problems of the daily progress.

 

Number 1: errors are part of nature

Never expect to write perfect code all the time. There will always be errors and mistakes, that can be compared to chess blunders. 

 

 

Number 2: Believe in step by step progress

As I grew up in Korea, I am always busy looking for quick progress and answer. However, this was the single most wrong attitude when learning to code. As I said, I always only copy and paste the error messages on google and tried to find some lines of code in StackOverflow to quickly fix my problem, but as you might know, without understanding my problem, I can't solve the problem.

 

I need to stop busying around and try to really read the error messages and find out why this might have happened in the first place. I didn't even think about this process as I was confident that I know nothing, but this was wrong. We can only see a step ahead of our problem and need to focus on it. We must believe in progressing step by step will eventually lead to the solution.

 

Every person on the planet has the power to think

 

and we have to use it thoroughly. If we believe in our thought process or logic, it will lead us to the final answer anyway. Never try to find a quick copy-pasted solution but try to understand the fundamentals of the problem and try to fix it little by little, in the end, we will find out that this was the only and the fastest way to reach the goal.

 

 

Number 3: Be responsible for your own code

When we encounter hardships living and coding, I always had been trying to ask people and tell them to help me out. I believe in the power of asking people as you will find out solutions that you might have not found out deep enough, but this doesn't mean I don't have to take care of my own problems. I need to equip with a stronger mindset to try to at least understand my problem.

 

If we are in hunger, we need to ask people how to catch fish, not the fish itself. By understanding the mechanisms of how machines and codes work, we can be good programmers.