When people talk about the hardest thing they’ve ever had to learn, I always think back to the time I took a programming course on Flutter. That was one of the most difficult learning experiences I’ve ever had. I didn’t even have plans to learn programming, to be honest. My regular self don't know anything about programming. But the opportunity came, free course, close by, and it sounded like something that could be useful in the future. So I said yes, after all, I hear people saying "*Tech is the new oil money"*. But I didn't fully understand what I was walking into.
At first, I thought I would just learn the basics and move on. But Flutter wasn’t something I could just breeze through. The first six months were very frustrating. Programming in general was new to me. I didn’t understand the language, the logic, or even how things were supposed to work. I'd sit in front of my laptop for hours, trying to follow what I was being taught or fix something in my code, and it just wouldn’t work. It felt like trying to read a book in a language I didn’t speak. We had a Flutter book we were reading then, but it seems like even after following the suggestions from the book, it wasn't even helping me solve my problems
One major challenge was my tutor. She was already planning to leave the tech hub where the training was taking place, so her attention wasn’t really on us. Sometimes she didn’t show up at all, and even when she did, she was in and out of class, barely spending enough time to teach properly. I had so many questions and confusion, but most of the time there was no one to explain things in a way I could understand.
I’m the kind of person who learns best when I see things done practically, step by step. But with the way things were going, I hardly got that chance. I would try to follow online tutorials or use AI tools to get help, but they didn’t really work for me at that time. Most of the answers I got were too advanced or didn’t fit the exact problem I was having. And without someone physically there to walk me through it, it felt like I was running on a treadmill. Spending so much energy and getting nowhere.
There were days I felt completely lost. Everyone else around me seemed to be getting it, moving ahead, building things… and I was just there, stuck and confused. I get that most of my classmates already had some basics in programming contrary to me. But all my thoughts were "it shouldn't be all that hard". At some point, I started wondering if I had made a mistake by joining the course. Maybe programming wasn’t for me. Maybe I didn’t belong in tech at all.
But I didn’t quit. Not right away. Hehehe
Even though I didn’t feel confident, I kept showing up. I kept trying. I started to take things slowly, focusing on understanding one thing at a time instead of everything at once. When something finally worked, even something as simple as displaying text on the screen, I felt a small sense of victory and I held on to it for drive.
Eventually, some things started to click. I understood how widgets worked. I could build a basic UI. I got my first project app to run. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked and I won a little prize from it. That gave me hope. I realized that learning something hard doesn’t mean I'm not smart, it just means it’ll take more time and more effort.
I couldn't continue with the course after the training and 3 months internship due to some reasons, and having to channel my focus somewhere better. But somehow, I still have my mind on it. My friends then will send me some couple of screens for me to help them out with the codes when they're choked with work, and that's how I kept practicing after I left.
I don't think I've tried something way out of my comfort zone as learning programming was. But I don't regret the experience, I mean, at least I have something to write about on this prompt. Have you tried learning something difficult recently, or sometime in your life? How was your learning experience?
