I have been rather discombobulated over the last several months. I had a number of upheavals in my life. I left a job and started another. I traveled to a new place every other week. I spoke at many conferences.<\/p>\n
I have been running ragged for a few months now and I am trying to get myself back into a better mental state. Since I get to stay put for a while, I am trying to figure out a better routine for myself to help me shake off the last of my burnout and to prevent future burn out.<\/p>\n
One thing I have been struggling with is making time to code. I know this sounds incredibly stupid considering I am a professional programmer. Don\u2019t I spend at least 40 hours a week coding? Isn\u2019t that what I am being paid for.<\/p>\n
Well\u2026 not really.<\/p>\n
A lot of my job over the last year has been looking at other people\u2019s code and debugging it. Or looking at other people\u2019s code to learn how they did something. Or reading documentation to make a sample project to show how to do something.<\/p>\n
I had a few large projects over the last year such as wrapping libXML2 in Swift<\/a>. This project took between two and three months. The first month, at least, of this project consisted of me staring at code I did not understand and then staring off into space waiting for my brain to compile it. I had panic attacks that it would never click and I would fail and all hope would be lost. Then at some point I woke up in the morning and I understood the code. This happens to me a lot and I find the process quite terrifying. I keep worrying that it won\u2019t all pull together for me this time and I am just living on a prayer.<\/p>\n Regardless, during this compile time, I did not code very much. I didn\u2019t understand the code I was supposed to work with, so I couldn\u2019t write anything. I couldn\u2019t work on a tutorial or something else because it wasn\u2019t what I was supposed to be working on. So I spent a good chunk of time walking around outside with headphones on waiting for my brain to make sense of things.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t like this process.<\/p>\n Right now I want to learn C++. I am interesting in game engine programming, audio programming, and other low level programming that at this point is only being done in C++.<\/p>\n I went on Twitter and asked for some advice for resources. I got these responses:<\/p>\n First off, not everything can be done in Swift. It just can\u2019t. It would be nice, but we\u2019re not there yet, so this is a non-starter.<\/p>\n I have written about my personal experiences from not learning from books<\/a> so it isn\u2019t that I completely disagree with this statement. I just think that there is a happy medium between \u201clearn from books\u201d and \u201clearn from projects.\u201d That medium is the tutorial.<\/p>\n I have heard a lot of people talk about learning code from videos and podcasts. They put a podcast on their iPhone or just take the audio track from a WWDC video and throw it on while they go for a jog.<\/p>\n I envy those people.<\/p>\n I know this is ironic from someone who used to do a podcast (and plans to get back to doing so soon, I promise!), but I don\u2019t like listening to podcasts or videos. It drives me crazy. I need something interactive. Listening to someone else talk and not being able to have a back and forth and ask questions makes me completely insane. I have no idea how anyone learns this way.<\/p>\n I went to school for programming twice. The first time I dropped out because I followed the \u201cJust learn from projects\u201d line of advice. I would do a bunch of research into how to do my homework. I would do it once, then I would never do it again. I never learned or retained anything I did. I aced my exams but I had no fucking clue how to code.<\/p>\n\n
In Defense of Tutorials<\/h2>\n