Learn by Doing | How to Go From Novice to Building your Portfolio
When you’re first starting out, you may be unsure of the best way to learn how to code. Let’s assume you’ve already taken the plunge and decided to learn — how do you actually go about it from a workflow perspective?
These are our steps for learning by doing.
- Pick a language and start coding
If you’re truly starting from the beginning, pick a language like Javascript, a good foundation for leading languages used today (Node, React, and Angular). Start with a site like Codecademy to build a foundation, learn syntax, and basic functions. Then move on to online tutorials when you’re ready to start building your own projects.
2. Start building projects
Projects are the best way to make massive gains. Learn-to-code sites focus on examples that help you understand the syntax, but don’t give you a sense of what it’s like to build a project from scratch. Pick a website you like and rebuild it. Find video tutorials online and use those as guides. At Velocity, we have a few tutorials to check out as well (https://www.velocity360.io/videos).
3. Rebuild, Rebuild, Rebuild
Once you successfully build a project, build it again. And then build it again. And then build it a few more times. Do it with your completed project open in another window the first few times — it’s not cheating! Rebuild it line by line and see what you can do from memory. You want to build the muscle memory associated with programming your own project. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the more time you put into it, the faster it will become second-nature.
4. Review
Once you finish a project, go back and make an outline of the steps you took to get there. You’ll now have a guideline you can refer to whenever you’re trying to build something similar.
5. Publish to your Portfolio
Learn to use Git and start your GitHub portfolio. Codecademy (https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git) and Atlassian (https://www.atlassian.com/git/) both have great guides on using Git. Now you can publish all your projects to your portfolio.
6. Do It Again
Then, start all over again. Pick a language, build, rebuild, review, and publish. Before you know it, you’ll have an extensive portfolio, and at the end of the day, showing what you can do is the best way to land yourself a job as a developer.
Check us out at www.velocity360.io for more ways to learn by doing.
