Coding has become one of those things that it's essential to have some knowledge of. After all, it's the language of computers and nowadays, almost everything is made up of or run by computers.
When it comes to the higher level concepts I feel I have a pretty good grasp on things. High level languages like C++ get compiled into "pure" machine code, which is the binary code that makes up all computer communication. Those directions are sent to your CPU or GPU to be processed into information that performs some function.
When you use the internet, your computer "talks" to servers by sending information packets that obey certain rules, called protocols, that route the request and send the information if it is available.
The blockchain is essentially a protocol built on top of the internet protocol, and generally when one interacts with a blockchain (if it is decentralized) one is interacting with both the internet and the blockchain protocol on top of it.
Easy peasy, no?
But then we get into the thick of it. To the actual programming and development. I've been programming on and off since I was 12, but I've never quite made it to super advanced projects. To be honest, my current programming level floats somewhere between "perpetual beginner" and "always almost intermediate".
I've taken classes and generally done well, and I don't have a lot of trouble understanding most of the logic behind programming, but I don't feel as though I'm equipped to do something like, say, develop a DAPP on the Hive blockchain (which I would really like to do).
But there's a part of me that thinks this is something I'll refer to as the "swimmer's conundrum". In the "swimmer's conundrum," a new swimmer doesn't know how to swim. In order to learn, they must leap into the water. But, of course, they're nervous because they don't know how to swim.
I suppose at least with coding I don't have to be worried about drowning.
Going forward, I'm going to start finding ways to start experimenting more with the platform on the dev level. Nothing super impressive to start, probably, but we'll see.
Nothing to stop me from starting from dipping my toe in, after all. And if the water's fine, I might just find myself diving in.
I was stuck in the perpetual 'hello world' phase for a long time myself
Then I jumped onto a freelance site and bid on a couple jobs
Once you actually get a 'paying' gig and complete it you realize you can do it.
Start with something smallish , a little $20 project - I started with simple scraping stuff (PHP)
I got pretty good with multi-curl / proxies (scraping 1000 pages / sec )
I'm trying to learn game dev / 3d stuff - that's a whole different world LOL
Hmm. Not a bad suggestion. So just jump in and accept being out my depth for a bit, eh? Well, if that's what gets results I'm game.