Based on what I’ve read and the podcasts I’ve been enjoying, it’s pretty clear that the one challenge most beginner coders have in common is figuring out where to start.
Part of the problem is that it’s pretty tough to know where to start if you don’t know where you want to end up, but it’s impossible for a newbie to figure that out until they’ve gotten started. It’s an ouroboros of coding confusion and I completely understand why anyone might throw up their hands and walk away before their first console.log('hello world').
Personally, I meandered for a few weeks before I stumbled onto Free Code Camp (I wish I could remember exactly where I heard of it) and by the time I started their Responsive Web Design certification course a little less than a month ago, I’d already run the gamut from a block coding course designed for children (no shame about it, either) to various YouTube tutorials and crash courses, to beginner books that assumed all kinds of foundational knowlege and even an online ivy league Computer Science course to which I fully intend to return because I genuinely enjoyed the theory and challenges.
By the time I got to Free Code Camp, I had some basic JavaScript and Node.js under my belt (I may have been fleeing a particularly painful chapter on Higher Order Functions…) and had read enough to figure out where I wanted to end up: Web Development. Which means I needed HTML and CSS in addition to JS and something told me it was time to refocus a bit as the track I’d been taking was beginning to feel a bit too theoretical for so early in the game. I wanted to make sure that everything I was learning about JS would tie into my eventual goal and what I’d heard/read about Free Code Camp suggested that it would be the next best move.
A little under a month later, I’m building simple web pages and, though the course hasn’t returned me to JS just yet, I’m putting the reasoning I learned elsewhere to use and after learning the basics of the more complicated JS syntax (which, once you get used to it, is more intuitive than it seems at first glance), HTML and CSS are a lot easier to pick up.
Tonight, I got started on the third of four Responsive Web Design projects and framing the page was SO much easier than even the last project. And that’s the thing about coding: it’s as rewarding as it is challenging. Tomorrow night, I’ll fill in the content, and Friday night I’ll start (if not finish) the CSS.
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