Getting Help

We all need help from time to time—and we are happy to provide what can to people who enrolled on our programme (if you’ve just stumbled across Code Camp then our options are a little more constrained)—but the best way to ‘get help’ will always be taking steps to ‘help yourself’ first!

Important!

When you are first learning to code there is no such thing as a stupid question. From time to time we all have lazy questions, which is what happens when we are frustrated and just want to know ‘the answer’ without putting in the work to clarify the problem. However, if any time you find yourself stuck on a particular problem there is a 100% chance that someone else trying Code Camp has had (or is having) the same problem. You are not alone.

Helping Yourself

Here are four things that you can do to ‘help yourself’:

  1. Use Google–when learning to code saying “I googled it…” will be taken as a good sign! Probably the biggest difference between a good programmer and a new programmer is that the good one knows which terms to type into Google to get the answer that they need right away.
  2. Use Stack Overflow–as you become a better programmer you’ll start to understand how to frame your question in ways that produce the answer you need in the first couple of search results, but whether you’re a beginner or an expert Stack Overflow is your friend. True story: I have sometimes found answers that I provided (but didn’t remember giving) when trying to solve a problem. Note that you are unlikely to need to ask a question: most likely at this stage your question will have been asked and answered multiple times.
  3. Use the work of others–there is a world of knowledge out there on which you can build! Code Academy, Khan Academy, Medium, and dedicated tutorial-type sites like Towards Data Science, Software Carpentry, and Programming Historian all take different approaches to teaching you some of the basics. See if you can find others who have had similar challenges.

Yes, this is a lot of things to do when you want to know the answer to what feels like a simple question, but it’s an investment. If we just ‘give’ you the answer then chances are you’ll forget it as soon as your code starts running again; however, if you’ve had to invest your time and energy in sorting through a whole range of answers (some useful, some not) then you have found it for yourself in a way that you’ll not soon forget. In fact, you’ve learned something about both how to frame questions and how to identify useful answers. That, frankly, is a much more valuable skill!

Creating Opportunities

Learning to code is like learning a language: you need to practice! Set yourself little problems or tasks and see if you can apply what you’ve learned to a different problem, even if it seems like a really basic one! In the same way that practicing your Chinese or French with native speakers will help you to learn those languages, so will practicing your Python.

How to Ask for Help

If you have really exhausted all options, feel free to reach out with your question. We will try to help!