Learning programming to the level of being able to create web applications or work in the field can take a lot of time and effort. But what if you don’t like it? What if you spend all that time and effort and it ends up that you hate programming and never want to see its ugly face again? I hate to say it, but this can happen. I’ve seen it happen.

Learning programming can often feel like you’re running as fast as you can and getting nowhere fast. The minute you feel like you have something figured out, five more things pop up that you need to learn before you can even do anything useful. Measuring programming progress is extremely hard to do. It doesn’t come naturally to humans to measure progress of a mental skill. Programming is a very mental skill.

I recently got an email from one of my tutoring students about how he had finished setting up an e-commerce site for his Dad’s salsa business, which was a pretty big accomplishment. But there were two things in the email that I took issue with. One was that he thought it was weird that another web dev shop had asked for $3,000 to set up a shopping cart in Spotify and the other was that he felt that using an off the shelf solution (BigCommerce) was a cop out and he should have been able to build it himself.

The call came in around 3:00 PM and I ran outside to take it in private. The call was from the start-up in Michigan that I had been interviewing with for three weeks and they had finally made a decision. They were going with someone else. I was more than a little surprised. Things had been going great and we were already talking about future strategies and how I could get them to where they needed to go.