As a developer at Pollenizer I often get asked what you need to do to learn how to get good at development. The obvious response would be to tell them to get a computer science degree, and have some good teachers. Get a junior role somewhere and learn from those who know what they’re doing.

However, when I went to uni to study computer science, the job that I do now didn’t even exist, and there was definately no one who could teach me about it. My role as a UI engineer only really started being advertised about 7 or 8 years ago. Back then there was no real difference between front-end and back-end, you just had to do it all.

In fact, I only started my career in development about 5 years ago. Having spent my 20’s conquering a different occupation. I only came back to programming once I moved in my other career to a point of no real progression. So, back to the point. How did I learn my craft, and how do I describe this process to other people who want to learn about the web. In very simple terms. Stare blankly at the screen for 1000 hours.

O.K. that’s a bit harsh, but the basic principal is there. When you have no-one to tell you the answer and Google can’t sort you out. Sometimes you just have to “nut out” the solution. This is especially the case in front-end development where you can write perfectly good code and still the browser (I’m looking at you IE6) doesn’t want to render it the right way, even though it works fine on every other browser. You have to forget about what is right or wrong and just try and get into the browser’s head and figure out what needs to happen. Often this leads to extended periods of staring blankly at the screen wondering what the #$%@!. If you can’t get through those moments, then maybe programming is not for you.

I’m self taught. So I had many of those moments. I quit my old job and sat down in front of my computer for about 11 months to teach myself how to be a front-end developer. I was 31 years old an embarking on a career in something I’d never done before. I spent about 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week trying to figure it out. Probably about 1000 hours of that time was spent staring blankly wondering….. WHY???

I did get a job (about the time the money ran out), but in the 4 years since then, I’ve probably done that “1000 hours” a number of times. I recently spent the last 5 weeks making an iPhone app. I’ve never done it before. So I had to learn the whole thing from scratch. The last 5 working days were spent doing exactly this. That’s about 40 hours (minus meetings and other things) of staring at the screen and wondering….. WHY??? Thank God, I finally found the answers, and the app is about to go into a testing phase.

I recently watched my mother trying to re-thread her over-locker sewing machine. Lot’s of threads coming together in a complicated way. After 20 minutes she started cursing and wanting to give up. I told her that I knew the feeling very well. That is a bit like putting together an app. I realised that she would be a terrible programmer. Sure, I curse at my monitor constantly, but usually it’s when the problem goes unsolved for many hours, sometimes even days. You just have to push through and make it work. Giving up is not an option!

This is the way we work, and it’s the way I want to work. The stress is real but the rewards are high. So, I say, give it about 1000 hours, then I may start turning my attention to a different problem, and give up on the current one.