So, can coding be a lot easier ?
So most of us have had our share of interactions with developers, in some way or the other. Luckily enough I have now been on both sides - and frankly the experience of creating things from scratch as a developer has been overwhelming. But then not being a 'techie' from Day One has left me pondering with certain things, and in this "Hello World" of LinkedIn Posts, I take up one of them.
The best part of my tech-yatra has been the discovery that there's a a very strong & active community around development and StackOverflow is undoubtedly the best. The support and exhaustiveness of the community is widespread which definitely helps. But, as a rookie developer, 4 months ago, I was really torn apart in finding out relevant questions on StackOverflow, reading the top voted answers and then reading documentations as well whenever I faced an error statement. To add to my woes, not all solutions were customised as per my requirement !
Now, obviously there's a joy in learning non-linearly, figuring out things as we go but sometimes these 'blocks'can be dangerous. In fact, while at IIT, a major reason I discontinued coding was partially because of these 'blocks'. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneer of the concept of 'Flow' and author of the book by same name ( a highly recommended read for all ) explains from the figure below, our challenges need to be proportionate to our skill level for our continuous progress - otherwise we often get stuck up in anxiety zones with tough problems and we never progress onto the next level. So, if the plan is to be on a steep learning curve or learn within limited time (say, over weekends where you can't waste time getting stuck up and lose inspiration to progress), is there a solution to do programming an easier way ? Not so easy that it becomes boring but easy enough to be in 'flow'.
What if those guys who answer your questions on StackOverflow or people like them could answer your questions personally and instantaneously ? What if those moments of anxiety caused by getting stuck can be overcome easily with the help from experts who have relevant credible experience in that language/software/ framework ? Not an online tutor (cause that pushes coding into 'boring' zone ), but a chat-based assistant whom you could delegate the task of "StackOverflow"ing things and helping you ASAP only when you're stuck in a problem. And by virtue of their own expertise in the language coupled with past experience of handling similar problems from other users, the help would arrive an user's way far more earlier than their own efforts would have !
I would love to know your opinion, especially more if you're starting out as a developer and otherwise also, as to whether you would like to use a similar help at a monetary cost of say, less than 1k/year and how badly would you need it for whatever reasons may be - web, app, software development or data science applications, machine learning applications etc.
Would love to hear your opinion and feel free to contact me if this sounds interesting !
P.S. : Just to give a context of areas where I faced challenges, in past 4 months : I was involved extensively into building Machine Learning algorithms in fields of NLP, predictive analytics while building a small Android application on the side. Currently, though I have been figuring out things on applications of NLG and block-chain technology.
Full Stack Machine Learning Engineer | Computer Vision | NLP | LLM | Robotics
9 年Why let humans do the job when machines can do it for us. Chat - Resource Intensive in terms of manpower , leading to mostly unstructured garbage data. Stack - Structured data resulting in categorisation , grouping -> enhancing searchability , reuse by millions. Give it 5 years more and it will have enough data to build a chat engine to do the same.
Engineering | PayU
9 年Hi Rohit. That surely is an interesting idea. I've recently jumped into the world of android development and it is,as you mentioned, overwhelming. From whatever i've read, its important to spend some significant time scratching your head over the 'blocks' you refer to in order to truly develop and understand the respective area one has ventured into. Post that we may refer to online blogs for help (which in these 'block' situations may not be of much help either). So I am assuming that these blocks for a true programming enthusiast are something very challenging for which he/she has no answer either himself/herself or on the online community. So would it be feasible to develop an 'instant' chat assistant for such major problems ? (Would that be really instant? ) . If yes, I'll be glad to use such a service after paying a reasonable amount.
Building HyperVerge ASEAN | Product | Fintech | IITB
9 年You have nicely put everything. Yes there are blocks which are the prime reason people are afraid of coding. Sometimes it really becomes monotonous and hard too. Step by step learning is really the best method to learn but people don't take that path because of desperation or initial enthusiasm to make big thing and down the line they face problems. The difference between stack overflow and an instant chat messenger is basically putting a code in question because that will give a good idea of your problem to the person who is going to answer. Now if you can make something which is stack overflow with instant answering with codes and enabling the chat there only will be good. And this really doesn't need a mobile app as people code on laptops only ??.
Product | HT Labs| Ex-upGrad | Ex-JP Morgan | IITB
9 年Hey Rohit, Ypyou have nicely put down about the 'blocks' which we face whenever we try to learn some new skillset. The idea is to maintain through that tough phase of learning and implementing something new, while failing on a constant basis. My experience was much similar while I was navigating through ML courses. Having a chat based assistant would have most definitely helped me in multiple ways. From saving time to staying afloat during tough topics, a chat based assistant can come in handy for evaluating/solving a problem statement using different algorithms.