You're Not Slow. You're Just Solving New Programming Problems

Sponsored by

Hello humans!

Welcome to this week’s Sloth Bytes. I hope you had an interesting week.

Find out why 1M+ professionals read Superhuman AI daily.

AI won't take over the world. People who know how to use AI will.

Here's how to stay ahead with AI:

Sign up for Superhuman AI. The AI newsletter read by 1M+ pros.
Master AI tools, tutorials, and news in just 3 minutes a day.
Become 10X more productive using AI.

Join 1 million pros and start learning AI

You're Not Slow. You’re Just Solving New Problems.

This one won’t be too technical, more motivational. Which is a perfect time to ask

Do you like the motivational posts?

or would you rather I focus more on technical things?

When I first started programming, I thought I was bad because everything took forever.

Writing a function? 1 hour.

Fixing a bug? 3 hours.

Setting up a new project? Might as well block off the weekend.

Ok I’m being dramatic, but it really did feel like everyone else just knew what to do while I was out here Googling "what is an API" for the fifth time.

But here's a secret that surprisingly nobody tells you:

You’re not slow.

You’re just solving problems you’ve never solved before.

And that's exactly what becoming a better programmer feels like.

New problems always feel slow

Think about literally anything you’re good at now:

Typing
Riding a bike
Watching YouTube videos
Even ordering food at a new restaurant

The first few times?
Slow. Awkward. Confusing.

The 50th time?
Quick. Efficient. You’re on Autopilot.

Programming is the same way. Every time you level up, you're voluntarily throwing yourself at harder and harder problems.

New languages
New frameworks
New concepts (async? pointers? threading??)
New entire systems you have to wrap your head around
New bugs you’ve never seen

Of course it feels slow.

You're pushing into new territory.

If you don't feel slow sometimes, you're probably not growing.

A real example

Last month, I was messing with drizzle and hono for a small side project.
I thought, "I know databases. Drizzle is just an ORM. This should be quick."

It was in fact NOT quick.

I always seem to forget that I’m pretty dumb…

I spent 45 minutes figuring out a dumb error
I kept breaking everything because it seems I don’t know how to read.
I reread the docs five times trying to understand one concept.
Entered a rabbit hole trying to find a solution.

Was I mad? Yes.

Was I bad at programming? No. (Well… that’s debatable)

I was just new to this problem.

And now? If you ask me to do it again, I could set it up again faster than before.

Speed comes from familiarity, not talent.

If you're feeling slow right now, that’s not a bad sign.

It means you're deep in the middle of learning something real.

Speed will come later. After you’ve wrestled through enough confusion to earn it.

So next time you feel like you’re "too slow," just remember:

Slow means you’re doing something new.

Slow means you’re getting better.

Keep going.

TLDR

You’re not slow. You’re solving new problems.
That's what makes you a programmer.

I’ll do some SQL Tips next week!

Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs

HiddenLayer’s latest research uncovers a universal prompt injection bypass impacting GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and more, exposing major LLM security gaps.

Datadog acquires Metaplane | Datadog

Datadog has acquired Metaplane, a data observability platform for detecting and preventing data quality issues.

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

How Postal Code Data Impacts Cybersecurity, Privacy and Fraud Prevention

Postal code data plays a quiet but critical role in everything from fraud detection to digital identity verification and the security of these datasets is becoming increasingly important in a world where everything is interconnected and impacting each other more than ever.

How Discord Indexes Trillions of Messages

Learn how Discord scaled its search infrastructure to index trillions of messages and unlock new features.

Thanks to everyone who submitted!

Looks like this one gave a lot of you problems 😁

E-Sieben, ariatheroyal, RelyingEarth87, bakzkndd, GabrielDornelas, and xanerin.

Shuffled Properly?

Given an array of 10 numbers, return whether or not the array is shuffled enough.

In this case, if 3 or more numbers appear consecutively (ascending or descending), return false.

Examples

isShuffledWell([1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 6, 9, 10, 7, 4])
output = false
# 1, 2, 3 appear consecutively

isShuffledWell([3, 5, 1, 9, 8, 7, 6, 4, 2, 10])
output = false
# 9, 8, 7, 6 appear consecutively

isShuffledWell([1, 5, 3, 8, 10, 2, 7, 6, 4, 9])
output = true
# No consecutive numbers appear

isShuffledWell([1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10])
output = true
# No consecutive numbers appear

Notes

Only steps of 1 in either direction count as consecutive (i.e. a sequence of odd and even numbers would count as being properly shuffled (see example #4)).
You will get numbers from 1-10.

How To Submit Answers

Reply with

A link to your solution (github, twitter, personal blog, portfolio, replit, etc)
or if you’re on the web version leave a comment!
If you want to be mentioned here, I’d prefer if you sent a GitHub link or Replit!

New video this week!

Working on a video explaining the fundamentals of AI agents because I think it’s really cool and the potential looks INSANE.

That’s all from me!

Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.

If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!

See you all next week.

What'd you think of today's email?

Want to advertise in Sloth Bytes?

If your company is interested in reaching an audience of developers and programming enthusiasts, you may want to advertise with us here.

🦥 It's OK To Be Slow