Unlocking the Code: 5 Invaluable Lessons I’ve Learned as a Beginner Coder
1.free resources rule the world!
Don’t get me wrong, there are many paid services that are well worth the cost. But if you are just starting out, please make good use of free resources while you can. When learning how to code I started off with FreeCodeCamp and progressed onto Codeacademy (until they were asking for membership fees). I also bounced off W3Schools and Youtube. I could say these 4 resources started my career off. It’s only when I started to feel like I lacked a sense of direction, did I look into paid services but before then, I was getting a lot of information from these sites alone.
2. Working alongside another developer should start as early in your career as possible
I was lucky enough to have a friend that had a friend that has a sister who was a software developer apprentice. (mouth full, sorry haha) and so I connected with her and she suggested that we do some paired programming sessions building projects that we could potentially add to our CV’s. I was so nervous because before this. My journey thus far was pretty isolated. I wasn’t sure if what I was learning was even sticking enough to build anything, especially alongside someone else! But I pushed myself and we had our first call. We decided what to build and set out a few things we needed to do to get started like create a repository etc.
We agreed to build a quiz and got the ball rolling meeting once or twice a week. It was extremely refreshing to know what I had been teaching myself was paying off by using those skills throughout the duration of our time spent coding together. There were things that I learnt from her and vice versa. The benefits from this activity were greatly received. It was insightful to see how someone worked things out compared to my methods, upon arriving to the same destination. Not only did this allow me to gain a little experience on what it would be like to work alongside other developers in a professional environment, but it also put theory to the test and allowed me to use the little knowledge I had and put it into practice, further cementing it into my brain.
If there are no immediate people around you that code then I would highly recommend joining online communities and reaching out to people there. That may sound daunting but there is always someone looking for the same thing as you!
3. Asking questions has to become your favourite thing to do
Something that's said a lot, but still I think people shy away from asking the questions they have on their mind, Including myself at one point. Being the one to stop the class to ask a question didn’t sound appetising to me but being an apprentice made me realise that if I dont ask questions then I will not get the answers I need and stack overflow wont always help lol. I’m pretty sure I'm quite high on the list of most annoying apprentices on planet earth but it’s totally worth it. A lot of senior devs can give top level explanations but need some questions to break it down further to make it understandable to someone who has no experience.
4. It takes a village to raise a child (but make it tech).
Sounds silly but hear me out! I kind of covered it in the first point but wanted to add a little more of an explanation. I explained how beneficial working alongside one person is so imagine there’s 10 of you? Having a community around you is the greatest way to success. You’re exposed to 10 different minds, 10 different ideas, 10 different solutions. Now that can sound a it overbearing but if you look at it from a different perspective then you can see that having access to such a network gives you a real chance to grow. You’re also exposed to more opportunities that could advance your career exponentially and you are more likely to stay focused with like minded people around you.
5. Be Consistent
Easier said than done, I KNOW. but it’s the only way you will be able to progress. When I first started out, the only reason I would begin to fall off and not put time into studying was when I was doing online courses that I found extremely boring. But just because these courses were boring doesn’t mean I didn’t need them so I paired the boring stuff with things that excited me. Let me give an example. When I was learning the fundamentals of Python I was also building a game in Java. The game kept me invested and so even on days where I didn’t feel like doing the course, I was still eager to complete the game. An even better example would be when I was learning the harder concepts of JavaScript. At the time I only knew HTML and CSS so I would build replica’s of some of my favourite sites. If I fell of from learning JS, at least I was still brushing up on my HTML/CSS skills. It’s all about balancing out the negatives with the positives. If you’re finding yourself not putting the hours in, try and go back to a topic you enjoyed and brush up on that until you find the motivation to try the less interesting topics again.
There are many more tips of course but I would say if you focused on just these 5, then you would be making a great start!
