The twilight zone

After the exciting liftoff stage of the developer learning curve, aspiring developers will enter the twilight zone:

This is a challenging time for students and many students decide to quit programming entirely during this stage.

So why is this time so challenging? After seeing countless students go through it, I've discovered that there are a number of contributing factors:

• While in this stage, many of the core concepts and commands haven't cemented themselves in a student's long-term memory. This results in them having to constantly look up documentation, query Stack Overflow, and things like that.
• During this time, the novelty of simply having an application work has worn off. Now students are asked to perform advanced tasks such as:
  • Working with legacy applications
  • Debugging defects
  • Improving performance
  • Building features that they don't have a step-by-step tutorial for
• Additionally, while working through the twilight zone, students are expected to start implementing best practices. In the launch stage, the primary goal was to get applications functional.

During this next phase, students start learning how to build applications that can be used in real-world scenarios. This means that a student may spend five times longer to build an application with the identical feature of something they created during the launch stage.

This can be frustrating; however, the increased time spent implementing best practices allow the applications to be scalable and flexible enough to be used in production. This is in stark contrast to the apps created during the launch phase that don't adhere to industry standards.