This Stuff is Hard

I'm beating a dead horse here, but I want to make sure that you won't be surprised.

There is an idea out there known as "Effort Shock" popularized by an article titled "How the Karate Kid Ruined the Entire World". If that sounds interesting to you, read it, but to summarize, most things worth doing take a very long time to get good at. What "good" is defined as changes, but I don't want you to be surprised at the amount of time it will take before you feel like you know what is going on.

This course will probably take around 100 hours, possibly more. When you're done, you'll be able to do things, but you will likely feel like you know less than when you started. The whole wide world will have opened itself up to you, and right now, "You don't know what you don't know". By building your foundation and focusing on learning how to do things, you open yourself up to learn any subject you need to, depending on your interests or the requirements of your job.

100 hours isn't enough to make an expert, but on the plus side, 10,000 hours is wayyy more than you will need. If you spend two hours a day learning (~500 hours a year) it will probably take a year or two before you get comfortable. If you do it right, the moment you stop feeling totally lost you'll just start working on harder problems and you'll wind up more confused than you could imagine now.

The most important skill you will learn is how to use all of your resources effectively to solve problems you've never seen before, whether that is your notes, classmates, teachers, reference pages, or Google.

Mostly, Google. Being able to do things with computers is a long term process of reinforcing and building on the basic knowledge we will teach you in this course, and it will never end until you decide the computers have won.

Don't let the computers win, and keep learning everything you can.

To help learn, I really recommend posting in the #findapartner channel in our slack. If you haven't done it yet, you really should!