Loading…
30
Can we talk about the coding meetup at the Aurora library that made me quit tutorials for good?
I went to a beginner Python meetup last Saturday at the Aurora Public Library on Benton Street and there were only 4 of us plus the host, Dave. He had us open a blank file and write a program to split a lunch bill between 6 people with tax and tip, no tutorial, no YouTube, just docs and asking each other questions. I sat there stuck for 20 minutes on one syntax error and Dave just said "read the last line out loud," and I found it in 10 seconds. Has anyone else found that getting stuck in a room with real people beats following along at home?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
paul34619d ago
The part about Dave saying "read the last line out loud" is the real lesson here. That trick works because your brain fills in what it expects to see when you read silently, so saying it out loud forces you to actually look at each character. I've hit that same wall with missing colons and mismatched parentheses more times than I can count, and half the time just slowing down and reading it back fixes it. A room full of people does one more thing too, it keeps you from quitting when you get stuck, since everyone else is sitting there fighting the same dumb error.
4