c/coding-for-beginners

Warning: the 'free' coding bootcamp preview at WeWork in Austin was a total trap

I sat in on their 3 hour intro session last Thursday and they spent 80% of the time pushing a $12k financing plan before even showing us how to write a line of HTML. Has anyone else gone to one of these and felt like they were at a timeshare pitch instead of a class?

1 comments

kair65•4d ago

Pro tip: Use console.table() instead of console.log() for arrays

I was debugging a list of 20 user objects last week and my console was a mess of nested objects I had to expand one by one. Then a coworker showed me console.table() which lays everything out in a clean grid format with headers and rows. It saved me at least 10 minutes of clicking around in DevTools. Anyone else have a simple console trick that made a big difference?

1 comments

nathanb71•4d ago

Took me 6 months to realize I was nesting my CSS selectors all wrong

I was doing something like .header .nav .item .link for every single element. My stylesheet was 800 lines deep and I kept getting specificity conflicts. Finally a guy on a Discord server asked me why I was making it so hard on myself. He showed me BEM. Took about an hour to rewrite the whole thing and cut it down to 300 lines. Anyone else have that moment where you realize you've been fighting against the tool instead of using it right?

1 comments

jennifersmith•5d ago

Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon in Python and wanted to scream

I was coding a simple calculator app at my kitchen table last night, and the whole thing just refused to run. Turns out I forgot a colon after an if statement, but I checked everything else like three times first. My roommate walked in and asked why I was staring at my screen like it insulted my family lol. Has anyone else spent way too long on a tiny syntax mistake that made zero sense?

c/coding-for-beginners

Warning: the 'free' coding bootcamp preview at WeWork in Austin was a total trap

Pro tip: Use console.table() instead of console.log() for arrays

Took me 6 months to realize I was nesting my CSS selectors all wrong

Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon in Python and wanted to scream

I finally stopped copying code from tutorials word for word

Copying Stack Overflow answers verbatim taught me more than building from scratch ever did

My coding bootcamp instructor told me to stop using YouTube tutorials and it actually made sense

That time a guy named Mike taught me to read code backwards

Hit 100 commits on my first real project and I was shook

Built my first function that actually did what I wanted on the first try.

Spent 3 months using '===' wrong in JavaScript

Copilot changed my mind about using AI for code

My buddy told me to skip tutorials and just build something, worst advice ever

Wasted 4 hours on a simple CSS layout last night

My first GitHub commit broke a whole project and I learned a hard lesson

Wasted $150 on a coding bootcamp course that I could have learned for free on YouTube

Stop using w3schools as your only resource for learning JavaScript

Built my first login form and it broke immediately

Finally clicked why my variables kept overwriting themselves

TIL a missing semicolon broke my whole site for 2 hours

I finally stopped using online tutorials that just copy each other's bad habits

Went to a coding meetup and nobody talked about actual code

Hit 1000 lines of code in my first project and felt nothing

Spent 3 hours debugging a React app because I forgot a single closing bracket in a useEffect dependency array

Spent $50 on a Udemy course that was just a guy reading the docs