The Hard Truth About Learning to Code (That No One Tells You)

AI Summary5 min read

TL;DR

Learning to code is often frustrating and full of doubt, but it's normal. Success comes from persistence through struggles like debugging and plateaus, not just intelligence.

Key Takeaways

•Learning to code involves confusion and failure, which are normal parts of the process.
•Real learning happens by getting stuck and figuring things out, not just following tutorials.
•Plateau phases build intuition and invisible progress, so keep going even when improvement feels slow.
•Habits like building small projects, writing bad code, and taking breaks can aid learning.
•Persistence, not intelligence, is key to becoming a developer, as imposter syndrome is common.

The Early Struggle Nobody Warns You About

When you start coding, you imagine you’ll be building apps like the ones in tutorials.
But instead, you stare at a screen for hours wondering why your loop won’t run or why everything breaks when you “just change one line.”

You’ll Google the same error 10 times.
You’ll read the same Stack Overflow answer over and over.
You’ll copy a snippet that works and have no idea why it works.

That’s not failure.
That’s literally how every single developer learns.

Tutorials Won’t Save You

We all go through the “tutorial phase.”
You watch YouTube, follow along, and everything works perfectly until you try to build something on your own.

Then… nothing makes sense.

That’s the moment when most people quit.
Because they think, “I’m just not good at coding.”

But the truth is...
You don’t learn by watching someone else code; you learn by getting stuck and figuring your way out.

The Plateau Phase (And Why It’s a Good Thing)

There’s a weird middle stage nobody talks about.
You’re not a beginner anymore, but you don’t feel advanced either.
You can build things… but still get lost in someone else’s codebase.

That phase feels like you’re not improving.
But actually, you are.

You’re building intuition, that quiet skill that lets you read code, predict bugs, and make cleaner decisions.
It’s invisible progress.

And it only shows up if you keep going.

What You Don’t See on LinkedIn

People post, “Just got my first job as a developer 💪🏻”
What they don’t post is the 8 months of self-doubt before that.

The nights were spent debugging.
The moments they thought of quitting.
The imposter syndrome that never really goes away.

If you’re in that phase, frustrated, questioning if this path is for you, remember:
The ones who make it aren’t the smartest.
They’re just the ones who didn’t stop.

Real Learning Looks Like This

✅ Breaking something that used to work
✅ Searching for answers for hours
✅ Realizing you misunderstood something basic
✅ Fixing it and understanding why

That’s growth.
That’s learning to code.

It’s not glamorous, but it’s real.
And that’s what turns beginners into developers.

What Helped Me Most

A few small habits changed everything for me:

Build small projects. Stop waiting for the “big idea.” Just build anything.
Write bad code. You’ll write cleaner code next month.
Read other people’s code. It’s like time-traveling into someone’s brain.
Take breaks. Sometimes walking away fixes more bugs than staying up late.

Learning to code is a marathon, not a hackathon.