Learning programming or software development can become challenging for those people who do have not any background in computing or never pursued a tech-related course.
I came across a post on X where an individual was struggling with where to start which inspired me to research and use the little knowledge I have to write this article.
For anyone willing to dive into software development before even writing your first code, I would recommend he or she Identify productive hours either at night or early in the morning. Identifying productive hours helps you to do a lot in a specified period rather than sitting at your desk for the whole day which can turn you into a zombie and feel stuck with "imposer syndrome", This helps in maintaining consistency and discipline which leads to Mastery in your craft. will try to break down the whole article with the six-month rule.
The next step is to choose your area of development e.g. web, android, or IOS. For instance, let's choose one diving into web development he or she will need to learn the basics of designing using Fig-ma which helps in visualizing how the interface would appear, its color, and where each feature will be situated, from my observation is better to work on something that you have a prototype than from direct using your mind saves on time.
Another step after choosing your area of development, it's good to choose your actual operating system of choice I would recommend Ubuntu which is easier to use and great for development, let's say you have chosen Ubuntu and installed it the next step is to learn the basics of navigating the command line, creating files, folders structures and other basics command line navigation.
After learning the command line interface, the next step is to learn a control version system e.g GitHub which is the most commonly used by software developers, It helps in tracking projects from a local machine to a remote GitHub server if your laptop gets technical issues it is easy to retrieve one's projects and encouraging collaboration whereby you can be able to work with different developers in one project remotely by using of GitHub.
Now after familiarizing with the command-line interface is time to learn the Basics of web development which I would recommend for a week and the second week do a small project from what you have been learning to test your skills.when faced with an error which is an important skill to master as a web developer , first take a minute and Read your screen and try to conceptualize the problem before coming up with the best solution to tackle it. if your have tried and nothing works try and google the same error and see how people responded to it on online platforms for problem solving mostly like stack-overflow, frame your questions in well-structured manner and post it for responses and in additionally always right click and check console on your browser mostly when working on a front-end project it show you the whole template and where the error is.
Before diving into Javascript it will a great aspect to seek out a mentor or a person who knows how to figure out stuff are done for accountability and for Mentorship whereby you be consulting regularly when faced with a problem,Tech related aspects .
After learning html and CSS, perfectly done your project now it's time to begin learning your first programming language whereby remember it project based learning , with Javascript before learning try and understand its pros and cons, support , community and it's Inventor. Javascript in web development is mostly used in making the fronted of your application interactive, so dive into it by learning the basics using official documentations online, learn it's syntax , make sure to grab the basics it's really fundamental in programming to avoid getting unnecessary errors, I would suggest to be done for a period of three weeks , after that period of time ,come with a project that entails HTML,CSS and Javascript , build as you learn. on that add some additional styling frameworks like bootstrap,Material for interactivity .
N/B I will continue tomorrow.
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