The first five minutes

I printed 160 pages of Java documentation on my school printer in 1998. Sneakily. Downloaded the JDK over a 56k modem connection that took forever. Set everything up exactly as instructed.

Then I wrote my first line of code and hit run. Error message. Cryptic, broken English that meant nothing to me. So I uninstalled everything and downloaded it again, burning more precious bandwidth and time. Same error. Same confusion.

I gave up on Java that day.

Years later I tried PHP with the LAMP stack. Wrote some code, refreshed my browser, and it worked immediately.

When you’re new to something, you need feedback that tells you whether you’re moving in the right direction or completely lost. You need signals you can actually decode. Whether that feedback comes from the system responding to your code, a person explaining what went wrong, or even just seeing your idea work for the first time.

Without those clear signals early on, momentum dies before it ever builds.