The Art of Learning to Code: From a Coding Beginner

Bola Adebesin
Nov 4 · 4 min read
Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

After spending the last 6 weeks learning everything from APIs to React Components, I am sharing my thoughts on the process of becoming a programmer.

It is with great enthusiasm and mild trepidation, that I enter the sixth week of my coding Bootcamp at General Assembly’s DC campus. Prior to attending this bootcamp, I was enrolled in an MD/PhD program, studying to become a physician scientist. On the surface, these two paths are completely different. After all, you may be asking yourself, how is being a doctor related to software engineering? Where is the relationship between diagnosing diseases in patients and building breakpoints in web applications. The key, I think, is in the process of learning.

Before starting at General Assembly, I was teaching myself coding using online tutorials. I would spend a large part of my day watching videos and taking notes. Which is, ironically, how I spent a lot of time studying during my first year of medical school. Soon, I discovered that even though I could tell someone what object oriented programming was or what it meant to consider modularity when building out a web application, I couldn’t necessarily do those things. I was regurgitating, but I wasn’t really learning new skills. This brings me to the main point of this blog post, learning coding isn’t just about what you know, it’s also about what you can do.

When I was in medical school, it wasn’t always easy for me to keep straight all the different diagnoses, the guidelines for distinguishing between diabetes and pre-diabetes, the difference between type I and type IV hypersensitivities (you get the picture). But whenever I was dealing with a specific patient or a specific case, I had no problem pulling that information together because I was seeing things, touching things, and actively participating. Like medicine, coding requires one to be an active participant. You can try to learn passively by absorbing all the information there is out there, but there’s a lot and you’ll be waiting a long time to build that awesome app or that cool game you’ve been dreaming about.

Building and creating is much harder than just watching. It means exposing yourself to the frustration of failing. It means being faced again and again with the realization that you didn’t understand a concept as well as you thought you might have. It means staring at a console full of errors, rolling up your sleeves and troubleshooting them one by one. Yet, there is a special kind of reward that comes from being able to show, rather than tell, exactly what you know. To take the skills that you’ve so painstakingly crafted an apply them to projects that you’re passionate about. For me, that was building a Fairytale trivia game that my friends could play, or creating mobile responsive web pages without bootstrap to test my understanding of fundamental concepts.

You don’t have to just take my word for it either. This article from the Free Code Camp goes into the difference between completing a tutorial versus completing a project. And this journal article from the Association of Psychological Science discusses how information may be learned less deeply if it is not applicable to what one is doing every day. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, we’ve heard over and over again about things like the 10,000 hour rule and the age old adage that “practice makes perfect”.

So, my advice to anyone who is just starting out on their coding journey is to set yourself up for success by doing rather than just watching. This article isn’t meant to demonize tutorials. They can be a great source of information because they provide context as you learn about a new topic. Still, you gain a lot by extending beyond tutorials. Once you’ve built something ask yourself, “Can I build this more efficiently? Is there something I want to add to this project that wasn’t covered in the tutorial? Can I take the skills I’ve learned here and apply it to a new project or a completely different task?”.

While I’m giving out free advice, the health advocate in me cannot help but emphasize the importance of resting and taking breaks too. Sometimes, stepping back from a particularly challenging concept or bug can provide the space for new insights too. So with that, happy coding and best of luck! If you have any suggestions or methods you find particularly helpful for learning coding or becoming a better developer I would love to hear them!


Originally published at http://github.com.

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