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Joe Everest
Joe Everest

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The truth about learning to code. (From a self taught developer)

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TLDR; You shouldn't waste a lot of time learning the basics. Get your hands dirty building projects as soon as you can to establish a good understanding of the concepts.

First things first, let me just put it out there. Nobody is really a "self taught" developer, and at the same time, everyone is a "self taught" developer.

What do I mean?

For a person to label themselves a "self taught" developer, they basically mean they didn't do the conventional way of learning by going to college and attending lectures and doing assignments.

The self taught path is more nuanced, an individual might have picked up a book and learned to code by reading the book. Somebody else might have watched a video course to learn to code. Someone else might have read the documentation, both official and unofficial.

But all these were curated by people. So, even though you aren't directly interacting and learning from the people that wrote these docs or books or created the courses you are following, you are still being taught by somebody indirectly.

And, on that note. Nobody can teach you everything. Over time, you begin to build intuition and learn from the work you do and projects you build. You learn more from your mistakes and establish a stronger foundation and understanding of programming and its concepts from your experience.

Not to mistake my opinions for facts, I believe that people shouldn't spend so much time learning the basics. Most of these you can find with a quick google search.

The best way to learn how to code is to blaze through the basics of a language or framework. You don't have to completely understand everything or commit it to memory. Then get to building projects as fast as you can.

You'll learn more from the mistakes you make, and you'll get to understand what all these basic concepts you are learning and might be seeing the point of are actually for.

A lot of people early on in their journey are stuck on understanding what a loop does, or what an if statement is useful for in building apps and feel stuck. The fastest way to set unstuck is to get your hands dirty half baked and seeing things in action.

This post started feeling like a rant, I think I made sense.

Follow me on twitter, I'm not fun but I try to be. 😎

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galaxyprogrammer profile image
Galaxy Programmer

I liked this post, and got me to realize that which one am I. I sign up for programming Hub which are free course's and also go to FreeCodeCamp which has a code tester. And do this all on my tablet.