It’s almost 2018 and tech companies are more booming than ever, AI is taking over more of our daily lives, and the mysterious Blockchain technologies are becoming more popular and powerful. For new developers, this tsunami of new information and opportunities can feel very chaotic, which is the reason why many people focus on the wrong parts during the first stages of their new career and miss many important, fundamental steps!

Working with the newest technologies seems like the absolute dream for many new developers. As the amount of new technologies increase immensely almost every single day, the pressure on new developers to know even more increases as well. As people reached out to me asking about those technologies, I noticed that many new developers are completely ignoring many important steps that they should make, as they solely focus on knowing the latest trends and tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. This isn’t only bad for them personally, it also means that many people lose their passion for coding as they experience too much pressure, and the community loses many valuable developers! Programming can be extremely frustrating, but staying passionate about coding is the most important of all! …

After I published my previous article about how I became a 19-year-old software developer, hundreds of people came to me with basically the same message: “I loved reading your article, and I really want to learn how to program, but I simply can’t get over that first step. It’s so frustrating and overwhelming, I miss structure and motivation.” I want to get as many people as possible involved in the tech world, and I think that it’s very important to focus on the people that are very motivated, but simply don’t know how to do it.

I know that there are thousands of resources out there nowadays that will ‘teach you how to code’. However, that’s definitely not the most important part here, and that’s not really what this article is about. How you structure your life around it, handling all the new information, keeping yourself motivated, and focusing on the right parts is crucial. …

Don’t worry, this won’t be one of the I wake up at 4AM every morning and go for a 20km run… -‘inspirational’ posts, that make people feel like they need to be some kind of super-human in order to be a good developer.

Some people might know me as ‘the girl that never does anything else but coding’ from Instagram (@theavocoder), but I’ve never really shared what I actually do on a normal day, and have done in order to become a software developer!

How I got into coding

I’m Lydia, a 19 year old girl living in Stockholm, and I am a JavaScript (React) developer! I’m very active on social media, and try to motivate more people to join the tech world by showing what my life is like in this community. …