Learning to Code
“Code” here is a verb. Meaning to write programs with a computer that will have a personal or societal benefit
The Convention
Normally, when a mom will teach her daughter to cook, she doesn’t start off by taking her to the market and then showing her every vegetable and spice along with which food they can be used to cook.
Rather, she asks her daughter to get a list of vegetables and spices for a particular meal and then shows her when to add what, and which amount of what to pour. Finally, the daughter knows how to prepare jollof rice.
The side effect, the daughter now knows that carrots, pepper, onions and rice are used to prepare jollof. (While cooking the daughter can ask, why she adds this or that.)
The Contrary
But, as a beginner to code, you might face so many hostile tutorials online that try to teach you every keyword in a programming language. At the long run, you just know the keywords, but you cannot make any meaningful program by yourself.
You then spend your whole life feeling amused of other people’s work and feeling that they are geniuses and you are not.
That is never true. Everyone is a genius, just that your mom might have sent you to the market to teach you vegetables and spices instead of how to cook jollof.
The Way
To learn programming as a beginner, search for tutorials that teach how to complete a project. For instance,
- How to make a gallery homepage with HTML/CSS
- How to program a music player in Javascript
- Making a GMail app clone
These kind of tutorials teach more at a shorter time, than vegetable tutorials. They make you independent to write code yourself. The side-effect, you begin to feel like a genius too.
My
I will be providing tutorials periodically on how to clone so many apps you use almost daily as part of Girls Can Code series. Just stay tuned and have Medium installed.
Thanks for reading. Give me some claps if you loved this article. Also share to your friends to bring more girls into the code community.
