So, you’ve decided to start coding — congrats! We’re excited to start building things together.
Before you get started, there are a few things you should know:
- It’s Better with Friends
- Consistency is Better Than Intensity
- It Never Works the First Time
If you’re going through our guidebook alone, we recommend you grab a friend to work with! You’ll have someone to share your struggles and successes with throughout this journey; it’ll make it much more worthwhile.
Of course, you can solo this journey if you so wish.
We recommend working our guides into your schedule, rather than trying to binge the entirety of our content in one-go.
Daily/weekly sessions that span a longer period of time will allow you to remember and apply concepts much more effectively than if you were to work through the content in a matter of a day or two.
Consistency is crucial. If you start to learn, make a commitment to continue to work on coding daily or at least weekly, whether it be through this guidebook or other resources!
This is taken from this great article.
When you first start learning to code, you’ll quickly run up against this particular experience: you think you’ve set up everything the way you’re supposed to, you’ve checked and re-checked it, and it still. doesn’t. work.
You don’t have a clue where to begin trying to fix it, and the error message (if you’re lucky enough to have one at all) might as well say “fuck you”. You might be tempted to give up at this point, thinking that you’ll never figure it out, that you’re not cut out for this.
But this experience is so common for programmers of all skill levels that it says absolutely nothing about your intelligence, tech-savviness, or suitability for the coding life. It will happen to you as a beginner, but it will also happen to you as an experienced programmer. The main difference will be in how you respond to it.
I’ve found that a big difference between new coders and experienced coders is faith: faith that things are going wrong for a logical and discoverable reason, faith that problems are fixable, faith that there is a way to accomplish the goal. The path from “not working” to “working” might not be obvious, but with patience you can usually find it.