Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point

https://zapier.com/blog/2012/07/08/learning-hack-tipping-point/

by bryanh • 14 years ago

74 28 14 years ago

tonyx• 14 years ago

Well said. I still go through that cycle every time I try to learn something new. Cocoa was really frustrating, especially as the debugger threw me into compiled assembly code. But once I got through the initial hurdle it became much more fun. Had that experience with Django lately too. The best (arguably only) way to learn seems to be learn by doing, reflect(which includes summarizing mistakes, reading tutorials, talk to expects, etc), and do some more. It tends to work out best when you have an end in mind, a real project that you are working on, which is what a lot of coding tutorial fails to deliver.

fredsters_s• 14 years ago

Agreed. I feel like we are probably the first generation who has grown up with the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Once you know how to use it, every problem seems solvable. Yet still the majority of my friends don't have this attitude. I've forgotten how many times (as the 'tech' friend) I've directed them to an lmgtfy.com link. I wonder what stops people from grasping the concept you're talking about here - from experiencing their own 'tipping point'.

graeme• 14 years ago

That's an excellent question. Our current institutions (school, work) are set up so that people by and large respond to commands from a higher authority.

Entrepreneurship gave me the incentive to find things on the one, and also made it necessary.

simondlr2• 14 years ago

I remember learning to code in Game Maker a while back, so each time I had an end goal in mind: the game I want make. In that time, I made 8-10 crap games, but each time I would code, I would more and more swap out the pre-build code actions with actual code as the complexity of the games increased. Besides the fun of making games, it was great discovering the underlying code, even if it is something as rudimentary as Game Maker's scripting language.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

Wow! This is how I learned to code too! I remember when I around 12-13, I wanted to figure out how to make my own message box in Windows (yes, I was weird). But I didn't know there was such a thing as "programming". In fact, I had no idea how software was made.

Eventually I stumbled upon Game Maker -- I think it was at version 4 when I found it. So I began creating little games with that cheeseburger icon and snowmen. Eventually, I realized that this thing called GML would let me do more. When I looked in the help file, one of the functions said to enter an "argument" and I seriously spent like 2 days trying to figure out what an argument was.

Eventually I got a Mandelbrot fractal going in Game Maker and discovered C at that point.

simondlr2• 14 years ago

Wow.Straight from Game Maker to C? Sort of happened the same to me. Up until uni I only knew Java, Game Maker and basic PHP/MySQL then started with C in freshman year. Although I mostly do web development these days, I liked working with pointers and memory management in C (once again delving down deeper).

jpadilla_• 14 years ago

This is something I talk all the time with students that are being taught all the programming classes in college. Most of them know how to program, or at least know the syntax of a language and know basics, but getting to that tipping point of having hacked something up is kinda hard for most people. After you've built that first thing, that isn't the obvious programming exercises found on textbooks, you've passed that tipping point and hacking will then come naturally to you.

sreyaNotfilc3• 14 years ago

A lot of people don't like the "discomforts of exploration".

Folks have mentioned that creating solutions to your own problems helps a lot. Well it does, but it takes some out-of-the-box thinking to realize that you do have a problem to solve.

Programming is like using an Erector set. You get a lot of pieces and can place them together quite easily. But when push comes to shove, how many are going to (or willing to) build a baseball launcher so they can avoid "pickling the Beast" (Sandlot reference)?

That's where imagination and subdivision comes in. Yes, you can learn all the theories and syntax that you'd want, but if you don't use your imagination and divide-n-conquer methods, you'll never make it.

Once you'd get past all of that, the sky's the limit. I'm proof of that. I hear of all of these miracle languages and frameworks, but I stick to what I know. Why, because it had solved so many problems before. And its because I have a vivid imagination and know what it takes to get the task completed.

alberich• 14 years ago

The article is nice, learning by doing is way more effective than just reading about something. I just don't feel very confortable with the word "hacking". This term is so overloaded nowdays that it's almost meaningless.

Anyways, good job :)

tatsuke954• 14 years ago

As someone with an interest in the programming world, I'm slowly "learning to code". I don't intend on ever developing in any occupational capacity. I'd just like to be able to have both a better understanding of what goes on under the hood, as well as be able to cobble together tools.

But I'm having trouble finding my own tipping point. I've worked through tutorials, online classes and introductory texts. Most of these things have you typing code in an editor, solving very minor problems, and seeing the results. But there's a big gap between, say, typing a little program in an editor, and a full blown web page or game. I understand that when you drill down in an iPhone app, for example, there's code back there, most of which I can't recreate, but can understand on a basic level. But what I don't understand is how that code gets there; how do all the pieces of code fit together to make a finished product, and how do you get it there? It's still sort of a black box to me, and haven't found the resource that can get me across that chasm.

I bring this up because I'm waiting for the epiphany, when I can say what the author does:

>"What had previously been a mysterious and confusing world suddenly started making a little bit of sense."

It's difficult when learning from scratch.

mwd_• 14 years ago

It's probably a lot easier to understand a larger project like a game or a website by trying to implement something substantial on your own. A lot of the obvious approaches to coding that work for small examples don't scale well for one reason or another. In the process of running into roadblocks and finding solutions (typically with the help of google) you'll encounter some of the pieces that end up in something like an iPhone app and at that point you'll probably be in a much better position to understand them.

anthonyb3• 14 years ago

Two things:

It definitely helps to have some sort of scaffolding or small seed program to help get you started. If you're looking at other people's projects you don't see all of the small choices and decisions that they made, just the final product. That always seems a lot more complex and intimidating than whatever it is you're currently working on. (If they're on github, you can sometimes go back to revision 1 and see what they started with, then roll forwards and watch them work)

The second thing is that programming is a lot like maths, in that learning it in and of itself is pretty dull. Having something that you want to do, with programming being the tool that you apply to help you get there, is a lot more motivating (and seems to be the tipping point experienced in the article)

tatsuke954• 14 years ago

Appreciate the responses. Keep in mind this comes from a guy with no programming background.

I suppose I'm finding it easier to get exposure to the science, but not the art. Or maybe a better way to put it is, writing code is one thing, but making software seems completely out there to me.

I was a big fan of MUDs as a younger guy, so as a practice project as I work through texts and tutorials I've been building a little choose-your-own-adventure game. It started as a slightly modified "Hello, world!". As I learned about more complex things, from loops to functions and packages, to objects and classes, I've found ways to complicate the program by adding in the things I've learned. Now I have a couple thousand lines of code (bloated, I'm sure!) and a little game that, at the least, has a wee bit of depth beyond "enter your name:". But at the end of the day, it's some code in a text editor. I could spend more and more time adding more and more code, but it's still a command-line executed script. How do you make it "software" if you get my meaning?

There are other examples: I've been using python to learn to play with data, with some success. I can get data in, manipulate it a bit, and spit it back out. Great. But how would I automate that, drawing a file in from a folder automatically, manipulating the data according to my python code, then ejecting it onto a webpage into some graphing package. I know that isn't a complicated procedure (it's essentially a transfer of data), but I don't even know where to start.

Or you mention Github. While I know what it is (sort of), I have no idea how it works or why people use it,outside of sharing code. APIs? I know that they're a way to transfer data between pieces of software. But I don't know the first thing about how I'd use, say, the Twitter API, even to mess around for practice, by adding some extremely basic functionality to my "game".

This probably sounds ridiculous to people with experience. But I'm living it. I guess I feel like I've done enough programming 101 and am ready to see what 102 is all about. To me that's not "learn another language", it's "how do I turn code in a text editor into something". There don't seem to be many resources that cover the subject. That's the epiphany I'm waiting for.

It seems the answer is to define a small project, specifically, then set about doing it, with Google as your friend.

kadabra9• 14 years ago

I've taken the exact same approach through the years as I've gradually started working on more complex projects. So, it's sort of comforting knowing that I'm not alone in the "just get something working, no matter how ugly/bad it is" camp. This sort of mentality, no matter how good/bad, was really helpful because it forced me to take a look at what I had made objectively, as I began to look back on old code/projects I wrote and finally ssee not only how "ugly" it was, but more importantly, why it was ugly.

I'd then move on to a more challenging project, proceed to find some horrific, hacky solution, then talk and show it to people smarter than me and who could point out better ways to do things. I think if you're able to look at things you've made from years back and say "wow, I was a much worse programmer then, for these reasons", that says a lot about how much you've learned so far.

daemon13• 14 years ago

I am 35+. Never coded myself except for small feats in HTML/CSS. Background - corporate finance.

It's difficult to learn from scratch, but it is not that difficult.

If your goal is web development, then I would point several key things that worked for me:

1. Don't be afraid to start and try it out.

2. Knowledge builds by iterations.

3. If you stumble - make a break, then get back to the stumbling block. Most of the times it will be solved fast.

4. Keep your end in mind.

5. Do some practical project, that has value for you.

About me:

- punched with HTML/CSS; hand programmed simple static site;

- got aquainted with Drupal; digged into Drupal; installed on hosting, installed and played with some modules, played with changing themes;

- started Django - Django book, tutorials, various books - stumbled;

- read through Learning Python by Mark Lutz, did exercieses - stumbled after 60-70% [decorators, etc];

- returned to Django, continued with books & simple projects - needed to get static assets working -> had to install webserver, did not want Apache, so I tried nginx - stumbled;

- got VPS from Linode - but needed to know a bit CLI and Ubuntu nix, since server is headless; stubmled - went through CLI tutorials;

- at the same time when installing web server stumbled with DNS, had no clue how it works, stubled - so digged through wiki, blogs, etc to understand the basics;

- with CLI and DNS basics under my belt, started setting up VPS - some packages in Ubuntu repositories were old and security risk - installed from PPA, but had to compile nginx, postgres, some other packages;

- installed!;

- in one week the whole set up was hacked;

- went through too many tutorials on nix hardening; iptables; auditing tools ; honeypots; logging local and remote; server monitoring [Graphyte and friends]; rootkit detectors, etc

- now back to Django...

In the background I digged a little bit into - databases [postgres, mongo, redis]; js [charts, various other libs]; some Python libs [requests, Pygments, etc]; OLAP/BI and host of other things.

That is a short summary w/o too many details.

It is a lot of fun - don't limit yourself. Your fears are your first enemy. So just do it.

lubutu2• 14 years ago

I think the way that one learns to program says a lot about the programmer. I, like many people, started with games and websites, but although I understood conditionals and loops, and even glimpsed OO, I wasn't very good. My software sucked, I got bored of it, I slowed to a stall.

A couple of years later I picked up Python, and instead of trying to make games or websites, I worked on stupid little puzzles. Pointless things, really. After a lot of work I built a Befunge interpreter (probably my own "tipping point"). And many useless puzzles later, I somehow wound up a genuine computer scientist.

People always talk about "getting things done". I just worked on meaningless puzzles, and that was the best thing I could have done. Anecdotally, to me it was about achievements and challenges. If you grow tired of the drive to "get things done", make something pointless.

zaphar• 14 years ago

The "thing" in getting things done is fuzzy. For you it was a "meaningless" puzzle. For me it was an implementation of Conway's game of life. For others it was modifying their wordpress blog or making automating their financial tracking.

The point is there is something you want to do and you used a programming lanaguage to do it. As a result:

   * You were self guided not following someone elses steps.
   * You were rewarded with some self confidence when it worked.

That's the tipping point the OP was talking about I think.

bryanh• 14 years ago

OP here: exactly what I meant.

lubutu2• 14 years ago

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that for me it wasn't that there was "something I wanted to do and I used a programming language", but rather that I wanted to use a programming language so I found something to do. For me it was about the (self-guided) achievements and challenges: I wasn't "hacking a way to a solution," and would often return to the same problem and solve it again and again, never "falling back to really hacky solutions to get things done." It's a bit fuzzy (things do get done either way), but I think there is a distinction in approach.

Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point

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