6 tips on beginning your coding/development journey!

As experienced by a professional restarter

Hi I’m CanadaBound 🇨🇦🇨🇦 and I would call myself a professional restarter. I took a comp sci degree (which I hated) and took a tech job that doesn’t fulfil my creative needs. So I’m back to development for the 3rd time in my life. I’m not qualified to lecture on anything but these are my experiences and I think they are useful if you’re starting off or if you’re coming back to developing.

I’ll tell you a little bit more about why I call myself a Professional Restarter if you don’t care or just want to know the points skip from here to point 1.

I’ve attempted to learn to code 3 times in my life. I was never the kid that particularly cared for coding, I love creating things but coding just lacked something to me. Back then I had no idea how to learn or ask questions or anything. Coupled with the fact that, by today’s standards, web dev technology was clunky, unintuitive and just not fun it didn’t make for a good learning experience. I spent 6 months, maybe more, following some boring tutorials to make a website I didn’t care for and using tech that I didn’t enjoy.

Nevertheless, even though I disliked coding I was pushed in the direction of a comp sci degree from parents who thought it would make me good money and it does, but it lacked one thing and that was interest from me.

This leads to my second attempt at learning coding (and a way more successful one at that). At this point in time the technology was much more advanced, the tutorials got better and the opportunities were wide and as far as the eye could see. I learnt the basic web dev tools (ja/css/html/php/MySQL), python and a bit of Java (which I still have a strong dislike to) I had little interest in doing more than what the degree got me to do.

I admit it’s my fault but at the same time this reflects back on to the resources I was using and my lack of interest in them (I would also partly blame depression on this, I smoked like a train and drank even more as I was unhappy) I had no interest in trying to make things work more than what I needed to as I didn’t care for the assignments. Finally, with that they sent me off into the real world.

The issue with that was, everybody and their mother, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles decided 3/4 years before, that comp sci was an unspoiled gold mine. So with few basic tools in hand and no experience I went looking for a dev role, with nothing great to be found. So I went into the role I am in now, it’s tech-y but really only in title and it pays well. 2 years ago I gave up coding again, thinking I wasn’t ever going to pick it up again.

Finally, the 3rd time. I picked up coding less than a month ago now, and the points below is why this will be the last restart. I might not have that much knowledge in coding, but I have in restarting and finally I am ready.

I hope these points help even one of you guys to follow what you need to do. It won’t be easy, or sometimes fun but in the end it will be worth it.

1) Solve a problem or issue you encounter in your life 🧩

Lots of developers suggest making a minesweeper, or a shop website or a paint tool as a starting project. It’s all well and good but I don’t know about you guys, but I couldn’t care less about a paint tool or a minesweeper. Projects will get hard, you will get stuck on small problems for days. You will give up if you don’t care about the problem you’re solving.

I’m thinking of writing about the project I’m doing but I’ll give you guys a quick example of what I mean. If I’m all about saving myself money because I want to buy myself a car and I want to learn about front/back end web development. Wouldn’t it be better to create a supermarket aggregate site and voucher finder so that you can put your grocery list in and find the cheapest shop, to do the shop in to save you the most money and find you any relevant vouchers rather than making an e-commerce website for example. You will learn a lot of different tech and methods doing this, whilst having the drive to tackle the big problems.

2) For god’s sake, just start! 🎬

The more time you spend telling yourself you’ll start but you need to gather the resources, join these groups and download all these pieces of software. The less likely it is that you’ll actually start. So just pick a tutorial, any basic tutorial in what you’re trying to learn. Do it and then you can move on to developing what you want before you get into tutorial hell and that’s a hellish place to be as the name suggests.

3) The more complex the better👾

From my experience it’s better to dive into the deep end and learn to swim when you’re in the water. You’re never going to learn everything about JS or C#, just learn what you need when you need it and you’ll build up a pool of knowledge over time.

If you pick a complex project to make, you will for sure learn the basics and probably learn some good complex ideas in the tech of your choice. You will have multiple goals automatically created for you to work towards. You will also learn the under-appreciated skills of versioning, using git repositories and proper testing.

So aim high!

4) Choose a framework/tech to work with💻🖥

There are hundreds of methods, technologies and frameworks to use in this world.

It doesn’t matter what you pick! Choose what looks good to you and what let’s you make the project you want to make. Whether it’s the vanilla JS, HTML and CSS. Angular, React, PHP, ASP.Net core, Java, C#. It really doesn’t matter, they’re all useful, they will all work and teach you something you didn’t know before.

Once again the more time you take to do this, the more likely it is that you’ll give up.

5) Engage with the community 👥

Developing can be a lonely job. Reading and interacting with stack overflow, hashnode and hackernoon has honestly done more to improve my coding experience than anything else I can think of. Get involved and you might even learn a thing or two!

6) Forget the money 💰

It took me a while to realise this. Don’t set out to make this a career or make money from it. Just learn and make for yourself and you might end up making some good money from your ideas eventually. Developer jobs are hard to get, and juniors can get paid pretty badly. In this kind of a work situation, you’ll turn a hobby into another boring job. Of course you can do what you want, but from my experience, you will learn a lot more and perform a lot better if you treat it as a learning exercise with an opportunity for money.

So there you go, 6 tips to help you get started from a professional restarter. If you like how I write or what I write about, please follow me. I won’t promise a specific timetable or a topic, but I’ll write more about my experiences in tech and maybe if there’s enough support I’ll write about the project I’m working on.

Spoiler Alert 🚨 🚨 : Its a website and an app that connects to an api and a database. Using angular, ASP.Net core and probably Xamarin for the app. If you want me to write about anything else please make some suggestions.

Remember these are all my opinions and feel free to suggest more points in the comments.

Thanks for reading, CanadaBound🍁