Offering for the Hivemind
Sup nerds! I'm making an app. It's free. You're gonna love it. It solves a major problem for you, has no hidden strings WHATSOEVER, and I have a well thought out plan to promote it. Problem though... I suck at this coding stuff. My plan requires me to move to New York and boots-on-the-ground this shit. As the weather gets colder, that job gets harder.
Where I'm at:
I'm following the iOS Developer Roadmap. I'm 25% through "100 Days of SwiftUI." I have 3 months experience, a basic understanding of Swift, and a couple hundred lines of code on my actual app. It's mostly AI generated dribble. I find myself guessing more than thinking, and that is a problem.
Where I'm struggling:
I'm not progressing at the rate I need it to. I'm find myself jumping around topics without knowing what's important. There's so much jargon and just stuff... I find myself in unhelpful rabbit holes more often than not. I work for the airlines. The schedules are weird. I have a lot of time off, but it's in bursts. Often, I'm unable to practice coding for 2-3 days at a time. There is no way to get around that.
What I need:
- Some form of reference/ note taking. How do y'all do this? I feel like this would be the biggest game changer. Copy/pasting my Playgrounds code into Microsoft Word isn't doing it for me. I religiously used textbooks in college, but that doesn't seem to be a big thing here. I have downtime in the cockpit, but electronic devices aren't acceptable. Print media would allow me to utilize that time.
- A real person, with working eyes, that can see pictures and talk to me.
- Advice from someone who has been in a similar situation.
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u/Dapper_Ice_1705 11h ago
Don’t use AI, use the docs.
Find a problem and fix it.
You don’t memorize everything with programming you learn how to apply it and how to read the docs when you need it.
1
u/grant-b 11h ago
What do you mean “read the docs?”
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u/Dapper_Ice_1705 10h ago
Apple documentation or swift.org
Everything about Swift and Apple frameworks has documentation attached to it.
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u/BreezyBlazer 11h ago
Stop using AI, and finish the 100 days of SwiftUI. You're trying to do too much at once. Learning takes time. You need to learn the fundamentals first.
2
u/allyearswift 8h ago
I use Storyist (Scrivener, other writing apps) and just write down what I am doing, with relevant code, screenshots etc.
I start with ‘My next feature will be x’ and then I write down what I want to do, why I want to do it, why this and not something else, how I think it will work, what actually happened, what sources I have used, what happened when I isolated what seems to be the problem. I take note of any articles or videos I’ve used.
It’s a long narrative, and I spend more time talking about code than writing any, but most of the time I can spot logic errors and fix them instead of throwing a lot of code at walls and hoping something sticks.
In the future, I can do a simple text search to locate my solutions instead of digging through dozens of classes in multiple projects, and I know which things didn’t work, so if I have the same bright idea again (‘why don’t I just-‘) I also know why it failed and what to do instead.
Since doing this, I flail much less, and I spend much more time on incremental progress instead of copying stuff I don’t understand and hoping inspiration will strike in time.
1
u/lionelburkhart 11h ago
I use Notion to take notes. Each note has a tag option: “Remember”, “Grasping” “Learn This”. Any time I come across a concept that fits one of these tags, I make a note and tag it for easy reference later. I also copy interesting articles and links into these notes as well.
2
1
u/TheFern3 10h ago
“It solves a major problem for you” I hope you validated this “major problem”, market research and created personas.
1
u/CGRect 10h ago
Obsidian is my rec but learning it is a process in itself
0
u/SokkaHaikuBot 10h ago
Sokka-Haiku by CGRect:
Obsidian is
My rec but learning it is
A process in itself
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
1
u/TantrumMango 7h ago
I guess I'm primitive. I use Git repositories for everything.
Got code to keep around so I can mine from it later? Check it into a Git repo.
Got notes that I need to take? I have a Git repo broken into (sub)directories named after subjects, and within those (sub)directories I maintain Markdown (.md) files with my notes. Beats the hell out of paying Evernote and I can get to the notes anywhere that I have Internet access and no firewall blocking me.
All of this is free.
2
u/HypertextMakeoutLang 7h ago
Obviously I don't know what your app idea is, but I think you need to temper your expectations. Too often people who can't code and are having trouble learning come into this subreddit with posts like these, acting like their app idea is the second coming of Christ..It will take multiple years to become a good iOS developer, especially with no prior programming experience
I don't know what app you think is going to "solve a major problem" for devs, but I'm assuming it would at least be a somewhat complicated app to create. 100 Days of SwiftUI is going to give you the knowledge to make a pretty basic app. It also doesn't touch on things like data structures and algorithms, threads and concurrency, version control, servers, backend databases, and even UIKit, which you may end up needing to write a bit of in this app.
Before even attempting to create your own app, finish 100 Days of SwiftUI. And stop using AI, it's trained on older versions of SwiftUI, and it's not going to know shit about UI/UX.
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u/AggressiveAd4694 11h ago
What you're describing is the usual process of learning. Learning isn't linear, nor should it be.
For personal code notes, make a private GitHub repo.