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Can we talk about spending 2 weeks on CS50 and still bombing the first problem set?
I started Harvard's CS50 course online last month after my cousin in Austin said it was the best free intro to coding, and I made it through all the lectures on C, pointers, and memory without too much trouble. Then I sat down for problem set 1, which is just Mario's pyramid in C, and it took me nine hours across two days to get it working, and my final version still had a bug where it printed an extra space. I felt like a total fraud because I could follow everything in class but the second I had a blank editor I froze up and forgot basic loops. My roommate, who's a junior dev, told me that's normal and that watching is not the same as building, which honestly made me feel a little less dumb. Now I'm torn on whether beginners should grind through hard problem sets alone to build grit, or lean on tutorials and AI hints early to keep momentum and not quit. I see both sides, because struggling taught me more than the lectures did, but quitting in week 2 teaches you nothing at all. What worked for you when you first learned to code, did you push through the wall alone or ask for help fast?
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evan517h ago
That line about freezing up with a blank editor hit home for me. When I was learning Python a few years back I did the same thing, watched hours of videos and felt smart, then sat down to write a little script that just read a text file and counted words and totally blanked on how to open the file. What saved me was giving myself a 20 minute rule, if I was stuck that long I'd look up one hint, not the answer, and then close the tab and try again. Struggling forever alone just made me want to quit, but copying whole solutions taught me nothing. Little hints kept me moving and the wins kept me coming back.
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