The First Project

… it wasn’t until I started to work on my first project that I understood why the “first project” is important.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of just learning some code and completing exercises, yet it wasn’t until I started to work on my first project that I understood why the “first project” is important.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

The first project begins to exercise your “problem solving muscle”, which involves a lot of thinking. Practising to think and problem solve towards a real goal is the only way to practise coding. However there is a missing piece of advice hidden when “experiencing the first project”.

I remember when I couldn’t get my pizza dough right; I spent weeks trying to figure it out. I looked through every resource I could think of. After many iterations, I eventually figured out my pizza dough issues and now I can confidently make it without worrying how it will turn out.

That’s when it hit me, the most important benefit of your first project is instilling the right kind of self-talk to build resilience. I caught myself saying “( figured out pizza dough, I can figure out this code”.

I’m leveraging a positive experience where I knew I was resilient to the end of a desired goal. I have a belief that there is no reason why I can’t figure out my code when I figured out pizza dough. The right self-talk builds the correct attitude which can help get through any problem if you’re patient enough.

Before I forget, I should probably state what my first project is… it’s a pizza dough calculator in Python.

Word count: 250
Twitter: @bhavprajapati

Cook 2 Code: Learning code through my love of cooking. Read the intro here. Welcome — Introduction. Working with engineers and not being… | by Bhavin Prajapati | Cook 2 Code | Dec, 2022 | Medium

But why 250 words? I have another blog called Fiftytwo250 where I write random essays over the week, capped at 250 words or less. You can learn more about the blog at fiftytwo250.com and the introduction post on the premise of a word cap here: https://medium.com/fiftytwo250/welcome-to-52-250-e955e3ac962e