It didn’t take long before I, just learning to program, came across The Wall. Anyone who’s ever tried to code has come across it, even if you don’t call it that, and when you do you either climb over it or flee in terror.

It’s that block of heiroglyphic, nonsensical gibberish you see when you look at your first page of code. It’s enough to make even the most abstract thinker break into a cold sweat but, like all things that appear hard at first, once you get over it, learn it and understand it, it becomes as simple as reading a book.

My Brain Doesn’t Work That Way

People like you and me though, designer, we live in a visual world. We don’t live in lines of brackets and semicolons, but without code our incredible and awe-inspiring designs lack life. They just sit there, beautiful and useless.

Have no fear, though, because if you’re able to climb over The Wall, the rewards are great.

And here’s a secret: you don’t have to learn everything. There are many designers who, when trying to learn code, try to learn everything they can about a language. Stop. You don’t need to. Listen, the more you know a language the better, but in the ebb and flow of technology trends striving to be ridiculously proficient in a programming language is a waste of time. You can’t learn everything about a language; no one can.

Instead, remember that you’re a creative thinker. Remember that your strength lies in your ideas. Let your ideas and thoughts guide exactly what parts of a language you learn.

The Basics

You can’t get away from them. You need your basics, your control flow, your loops and syntax and functions and objects. Learn what those strange and unusual terms mean and how to use them. Find out what the hell a singleton is, or how many MVCs it takes to screw in a lightbulb. And then make something stupid. Make something simple and dumb and fun. Make something. Feel the interactive power that typing those heiroglyphics brings you. And then move on.

Build the things you want to, the things that fill your brain with an insane fire that keeps you up at night. You’ll get stuck and frustrated, and then you’ll turn to Google and Stack Overflow, because no matter how original you think your idea is, I guarantee someone has thought of it, or something like it, first. There’s always going to be someone out there who’s better than you, but they’re also almost always willing to share what they know. Use them to your advantage.

Don’t be afraid to be a beginner, to ask stupid questions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re fourteen or forty-nine, if you want to learn, then invest the brainpower and time in learning. You will be rewarded for your efforts.

And then

When you feel you know enough, start sharing what you know with others, as those before you have done. We learning by teaching too, remember, and it often helps us as much as it helps those we teach.

The programming community can be defined by its open nature, its willingness to give and share and help. They even have a term for it: open source. And when you finally get to a point where saying “open source” leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, you’ll know you’re about as good as any damn developer out there.