Programming and Learning: eg on Udemy

When you can't get something done, or when you can't understand something, eg when learning on Udemy:

1) Try to find a working example of what you want to do, eg on another web site. Copy and paste and change to your needs. I see Rob doing a lot of copying of existing code from various web sites. This is a good thing in web development.

2) When you are stuck, watch Rob do the work. Then try to do it yourself without watching the video and without referring to what Rob did. Then try again the next day, or when you have time.

3) Sometimes it is difficult to get to certain concepts. I am currently a bit confused between the various syntax requirements in JavaScript, JQuery and PHP, but I guess it will come right with practice. For example string concatenation and $'s at the beginning of variables is slightly confusing.

Keep at it. Don't give up. And remember many of us give ourselves an unnecessary hard time, including me.

Note: Rob is one of the Udemy trainers.

Mentoring Vital in Treating Depression. David Lipschitz letter to the Cape Times published Wed 13 Jul 2016

Your articles about mentoring and depression today (Cape Times, July 12) refer.

I had a meeting with Mr Nagel today. I asked him if he had seen these articles. He said he had and he wondered if I had noticed that they were on the same page. I said yes, and I said that I believe that the answer to depression is not only a "medical" one, but also a mentorship one.

I firmly believe that many (young) people are depressed because they are misunderstood.

And Mr Nagel said that it is time for a new academy to be started to mentor one million people from Lentegeur and the surrounds. He and I will carry this out over the next seven years.

And back to "the coincidence". Mentoring is above Depression. Mathematically if one were to "solve" the equation of mentoring and depression, one would put mentoring above depression, i.e. mentoring solves depression, hence why these two articles were coincidentally (?) organised the way they were in your newspaper and also why Mr Nagel and I coincidentally (?) met today.

One should note that Mitchells Plain's Mental Hospital is in Lentegeur. We would like to work with them to combine our mentorship and guiding philosophy with their medical drugs. We believe that depressed people are going through their "process" - "the valley of the shadow of death" that I wrote about in a previous article.

These people might need the drugs to help them get through the valley to the other side. However, if all the drugs do is keep them on the same side of the valley that they started on, then the medical profession will have failed in its duty by treating the symptom rather than the whole.