You cannot teach someone to code in n-weeks

You read that right. Surprised? Challenged?

I hear those words a lot from people not involved in helping people to learn how to code. It seems, to them, that what we are doing is something that cannot be accomplished; the human brain appears (to them again) not to be capable of processing the sheer amount of information needed to become a developer.

Having done this now for some while I could not disagree more with the title of this blogpost.

I have seen people developing skills that they did not have before on a weekly basis. Makers that only used their computers to entertain themselves suddenly are capable, within a few weeks (three to be exact) to develop a domain model with objects interacting with each other, TEST FIRST!

In fact, in the second week of learning how to code, I see people solving coding katas (like the FizzBuzz or the Roman Numerals katas).

The human brain is capable of absorbing and processing huge amounts of information, we do that every day.

Our challenge: finding and perfecting ways to tap into that potential in order to unleash the full learning capacity of the human brain.