The following blog post is born from personal experience and corroborated by fellow devs-in-training. So, you’ve decided to make the leap into web development. Perhaps you’re like me, a mid-career type needing an immediate and fulfilling change, or maybe you’re younger, fresher, and getting in while the embers are hot. Either way, those of us who fall into the self-taught realm periodically will fall into a few common traps if we’re not careful. Here’s a description of one of these landmines and how to avoid them…AT ALL COSTS!
Alice in Tutorial-Land
So this is you right. OK, it’s actually me but yeah, you’re in Starbucks, you’ve got your headphones on and you’re just cranking away. You’ve signed up to Free Code Camp, Codecademy, or maybe you purchased the latest UDEMY coding course for an amazing 135% OFF! and you’re off to the races. You feel like you learn some concepts and all is going well…then it happens.LANDMINE. You don’t notice it coming but when it happens it hits HARD. You realize you’ve been at it for a few weeks or a few months and while the tutorial site is giving you badges and smileys and flying stars for all your progress, there’s a sinking part of you that’s like “this isn’t fun anymore”. Sometimes it feels like you just spent the last 3 weeks re-learning something you thought you learned in the last tutorial. UGH! So what do you do? What else? Sign up for another tutorial – just because it didn’t work last time doesn’t mean it won’t work this time right?
You see the problem here and for a person just learning to code on their own it’s a hard lesson to accept – “Learning to code is like travelling through the desert. IF you just keep going, you will eventually come to a beautiful place with water and air and all the amenities you can imagine. JUST DON’T STOP IN THE DESERT. And certainly, don’t go choosing another desert just because this one hasn’t coughed up it’s milk and honey yet. See, the key to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Wozniak isn’t the day their big idea went live. The key is the YEARS and YEARS they were quietly hacking away at a computer, building a computer, or both that produced the genius we get to enjoy today. I get it, this is the insta-society with four-hour workweeks, 20 minute abs, and fast food lunches in under 5 minutes. Folks, learning to code just doesn’t work that way. Thus, I suggest the following:
- Before you jump into a learning resource, ask yourself a critical question: What do I hope to get out of this resource? Then read the course reviews and ask questions to determine if you’re expectations are reasonable for the given coursework. If they are not, DO NOT PASS GO. Choose another resource and go through the same exercise – there are TONS to choose from, ya just have to find the right one for your needs.
- Once you do start in a coding tutorial, don’t stop until you’re COMPLETED THE COURSE –like the whole thing, the end, no mas. Presumably, the course was designed to work best as a whole unit, not just the three quarter mark when you got bored and then you heard about that one new hot framework you can learn about on youtube for free and…you get the point.. FINISH IT.
Thanks for reading, more to come..
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