But where do I even start ?
So you've gotten over the "should I learn to code ?" phase and have officially decided to start your coding journey, you're happy and excited, you have grand, revolutionary ideas and you can already see your app becoming a hit on the AppStore ... but hold on, it's not all sunshine and roses.
Learning to code isn't a walk in the park but it could get pretty close. Below, I give you a list of things to help smoothen your learn-to-code journey
The first is knowing your why.
Why do you want to learn to code, whether it's to boost your resume in other fields, as a hobby or as a career you have to know the reason you want to learn to code as it's what determines your path, the best programming language to learn, and the amount of effort you have to put in.
When you know why you're learning to code you know the resources you'll need, you'll have an idea on how to create a smart plan for your learn-to-code-journey and it can serve as a sort of motivation to you at times when you face specific obstacles that make you question why you are learning to code and if all the time, effort and resources you've put into learning to code is even worth it.
The second is having a plan, there's a popular quote that supports this and it says 'failing to plan is planning to fail'.
When you don't have a plan you don't have a specific goal you're working towards and hence don't fully understand what it takes to get there. Something to guide you when making a plan is the model that can be traced back to [Peter Drucker (1955) and G.T. Doran (1991)] that says a good plan is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound, SMART for short.
Having a smart plan and breaking the plan into little pieces gives you a view into the exact steps you have to take to achieve said plan and gives you an insight into how much time you need to dedicate to achieving it, so you know exactly where you're going and what you need to get there.
So if you don't already have a plan written out for your learn-to-code journey, take out your pen and paper, do a little research and write it out now.
The first phase we go through when starting anything new is the honeymoon phase and in this phase, we're excited to start learning new things and working towards our goals, this phase lasts only about 2 months or less and once we get past it we're thrown back to reality. We start to realise how much work and effort is required to achieve our goals and at this point, most people tend to give up because things aren't as rosy as they seemed at first.
I'm here to tell you that everyone goes through this phase where you feel less motivated and you feel like giving up, but you don't stop- you never stop, because sometimes motivation isn't enough to keep us going and at times like these it's our determination that does the work, determination and discipline are what keep us going.
So yeah, coding is a little harder than it seems and isn't as easy as you thought it'd be and you're frustrated about having to constantly look things up every single hour of every single day, but you have to understand that everyone goes through this stage and honestly...we never really grow past it, there's always going to be something we don't quite understand and you're always going to need to look it up or ask people about it till you get the answers you need, what we need to do is embrace the process and accept it for what it is. Remember, ' good things don't come easy '.
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The most important path when learning to code is arguably the actual coding.
And this has to be said because a lot of people learn to code by watching hours upon hours of various Youtube tutorials on coding and when they're done they feel like they've absorbed everything they watched and know how to do it too, and if you are one of these people like I was, well I hate to break it to you but you didn't actually learn as much as you taught you did and it's not because of the video or the person teaching it, it's because you didn't actually write any code.
When you're learning to code and you're watching all these videos what you should do is open up your laptop and follow along with what you're watching line by line if you want to truly grasp what's going on, and this might come as a huge shock to us as it was to me ...but sometimes the code doesn't run as you thought it would and you're confused as to why this is because you followed exactly what was in the video yet you still got an error, so you start looking for what you did wrong, you browse some forums, watch some more videos and eventually you get the answer, perhaps it was a little semicolon you missed at the end of one sentence or perhaps you named a variable 'Name' but used 'name' when you were calling it, these little things that easily escape our notice we wouldn't even have realised these things if you didn't actually code.
Having a project you're working on when learning to code ensures that you have to do some real-life coding without following a video step by step, and this ensures that you know why a line of code is used the way it is and thus helps you better understand and relate with coding itself is all bout.
When you've chosen the path you want to take and have a plan for your coding journey the next thing you'll need are the right resources for learning whatever you'll need to learn. You'll need tutorials on the programming language you want to learn, the libraries you should use and so on.
Some good -and free websites to check out for both written and video contents are:
Freecodecamp Codecademy GeeksforGeeks W3Schools
I hope this article was helpful, and if it was please let me know in the comments below, like, share it with others so it can help them too and follow for more content like this.🙃