I’ve been learning to code for a couple of months now, but I figure it’s best to start at the very beginning:

When I announced to friends and family that I was turning down a job offer both sought-after and hard-earned — a position on the Civil Service Fast Stream — in order to learn to code; I expected this to be met with a certain degree of skepticism. With a degree, a masters, and a law conversion course already under my belt, I wondered whether anyone would take seriously my desire to learn programming and become a Developer; even I wondered whether I wasn’t making a huge mistake.

The reactions I received were, almost exclusively, supportive:

“Actually, that seems like a really good fit for you”

I began learning Ruby on Rails via Code School but it was much tougher than I had expected. I’d always picked things up really quickly in the past, but this was proving the hardest thing I’d ever tried to learn. Code School teaches through a series of video tutorials followed by a set of coding challenges. I was finding that I was having to watch each video multiple times in order to be able to carry out the challenges, and even then I was often having to resort to using the hints or online forums for help. This was humbling, but I didn’t let it deter me. However hard I found it, I was hooked! I thought about coding from the moment I woke up, and whenever I had a spare moment it was all I wanted to do — I stopped watching TV and even left a book (that I was mid-way through and thoroughly enjoying) unfinished.

At times I felt really stuck and, not knowing anyone who could help, I began to think that I’d really need some formal learning. I did some research and decided to apply for one of the 12-week immersive coding bootcamps. I was a little intimidated by the low acceptance rates, especially given that they didn’t seem to care about your previous qualifications in deciding whether to accept you onto the course. I decided that I needed to demonstrate my commitment and be a bit more proactive, so I signed up for a hackathon. Then panicked. The moment I’d signed up I felt convinced I’d made a terrible mistake - that I’d turn up, have nothing to offer, and everyone would wonder what the hell I was doing there. Desperate not to be the weakest link, I decided that I would have to pitch an idea, so I spent the next couple of days wracking my brains trying to think of something. I even went to the effort of attempting to validate my idea by carrying out some market research and constructing a landing page (all in the space of a week).

The day of the hackathon arrived and I pitched my idea. Whilst it received some interest, it quickly became apparent that it was far too big a project to tackle within the constraints of a hackathon. So I took a deep breath and joined another team, not sure what I’d be able to offer but determined to have a go. I needn’t have worried. As anyone who’s attended a hack day will know, a lot of the process is about project management, market research, user experience, and general problem-solving; meaning that non-developers can be extremely useful members of the team. I worked with a designer and a developer, and we made a really great team. I had loads of fun, made some friends, learned a crazy amount, and discovered I had skills I never knew I possessed (apparently I’m good at pitching). As it happened, we won, but this would’ve been an incredibly rewarding weekend even if we had come in last.

We were encouraged to take our idea further, and agreed that we’d like to, so I’ll be interested to see if that comes to anything. Whilst the code that was written will be binned and we’ll start afresh, it was decided that the main language we’d use would be Node.js, so I decided to park ruby for a while and concentrate on Javascript.

I didn’t take to Javascript to begin with, the syntax didn’t appeal to me as much as ruby, but I began to pick it up fairly quickly. Having struggled to get my head around the concepts involved when first learning ruby, I found that learning a second language was much much quicker. That said, for anyone who, like me, is an absolute beginner, I recommend starting off with the codecademy (which unlike Code School is completely free). The tutorials are really easy to follow, very steadily paced, and provide you with an excellent foundation of each language. Having completed the codecademy course, I returned to Code School. To begin with I thought I’d skip the first few tutorials, but even these contained things that I wasn’t aware of, so it’s worth starting at the beginning — you’ll race through, but you’ll definitely still learn things.

Once I felt that I had a reasonable grasp of Javascript, I wanted to start playing around with it; but I realised hadn’t the foggiest how to go about this. Code School had proved excellent at teaching me the language, but I wanted to know how to make my own projects — I had no idea what tools were required or how to go about it.

One of my hackathon team members had mentioned codebar to me, so I looked it up and reserved a place. Set up by Despo, codebar pairs together volunteer coaches with women and other groups who are under-represented in tech and need some one-to-one guidance. It’s currently a weekly meetup in London and Brighton (although I believe it’s expanding elsewhere) and is entirely free, generously sponsorsed by various tech companies and individuals.

My codebar coach showed me how to get started, but was quite surprised that I didn’t know how to do any HTML or CSS. It became obvious that without these, no amount of javascript was going to help me make a web application. I therefore spent the next week getting my head around the basics. HTML was a piece of cake, and the basics of CSS were pretty straightforward. I read a rather beautiful book by Jon Duckett which, along with the codecademy and Code School tutorials, enabled me to finally start to code something. Whoop whoop! I could start making things!