So, can coding be a lot easier ?

So most of us have had our share of interactions with developers, in some way or the other. Luckily enough I have now been on both sides - and frankly the experience of creating things from scratch as a developer has been overwhelming. But then not being a ‘techie’ from Day One has left me pondering with certain things, and in this “Hello World” of LinkedIn Posts, I take up one of them.

The best part of my tech-yatra has been the discovery that there’s a a very strong & active community around development and StackOverflow is undoubtedly the best. The support and exhaustiveness of the community is widespread which definitely helps. But, as a rookie developer, 4 months ago, I was really torn apart in finding out relevant questions on StackOverflow, reading the top voted answers and then reading documentations as well whenever I faced an error statement. To add to my woes, not all solutions were customised as per my requirement !

Now, obviously there’s a joy in learning non-linearly, figuring out things as we go but sometimes these ‘blocks’can be dangerous. In fact, while at IIT, a major reason I discontinued coding was partially because of these ‘blocks’. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneer of the concept of ‘Flow’ and author of the book by same name ( a highly recommended read for all ) explains from the figure below, our challenges need to be proportionate to our skill level for our continuous progress - otherwise we often get stuck up in anxiety zones with tough problems and we never progress onto the next level. So, if the plan is to be on a steep learning curve or learn within limited time (say, over weekends where you can’t waste time getting stuck up and lose inspiration to progress), is there a solution to do programming an easier way ? Not so easy that it becomes boring but easy enough to be in ‘flow’.

What if those guys who answer your questions on StackOverflow or people like them could answer your questions personally and instantaneously ? What if those moments of anxiety caused by getting stuck can be overcome easily with the help from experts who have relevant credible experience in that language/software/ framework ? Not an online tutor (cause that pushes coding into ‘boring’ zone ), but a chat-based assistant whom you could delegate the task of “StackOverflow”ing things and helping you ASAP only when you’re stuck in a problem. And by virtue of their own expertise in the language coupled with past experience of handling similar problems from other users, the help would arrive an user’s way far more earlier than their own efforts would have !

I would love to know your opinion, especially more if you’re starting out as a developer and otherwise also, as to whether you would like to use a similar help at a monetary cost of say, less than 1k/year and how badly would you need it for whatever reasons may be - web, app, software development or data science applications, machine learning applications etc.

Would love to hear your opinion and feel free to contact me if this sounds interesting !

P.S. : Just to give a context of areas where I faced challenges, in past 4 months : I was involved extensively into building Machine Learning algorithms in fields of NLP, predictive analytics while building a small Android application on the side. Currently, though I have been figuring out things on applications of NLG and block-chain technology.