Coding is one key skill to learn in today’s era, it surely can help you improve your critical thinking skills, problem solving skills and obviously satisfy your financial needs.
Trying to learn about coding, and how to start, can be sometimes a little bit confusing, and many decide not to embrace or even start that journey because of not even knowing how to start and what steps to take at first. In this article, I will be helping you overcome this confusion and begin your first steps in the coding realm.
Understand your needs
Before even writing your first line of code, try to see what you like the most. Sometimes as a coder you connect with your projects, since they are your creations and each code is a piece of art to you. So as an “artist”, try to understand what style you want to dive in. There are many areas in coding ( Web Development, Mobile development, AI-Coding and AI Models ) and besides coding, you can also dive into other similar-areas that may require coding as well, like data science and big-data analysis, obviously you can learn all these areas at once, since it requires a lot of research, time and knowledge, so you need to focus at first only at one area and try to have the expertise in it. Some areas can be fun than others, some can be easier, but it’s all a personal choice and it’s up to you to chose what you like to build.
Research and note
Now you chose what you will be coding, you need to find the perfect technologies or languages to begin creating your art piece. There is obviously no language better than another, or no technology better than another, each technology or language has its own pros and cons, and it’s up to you to do the right research to chose which technology you want to start with.
Each area is very vast, and there are many technologies and many programming languages. For example, for a web developer there exists many technologies, frameworks and stacks to work with, e.g:
- MERN Stack: Stands for MongoDB,Express,React,Node. This stack utilizes these technologies to build a fully-functioning web app.
To find out the technologies available, and to learn more about each technology, i suggest using either Google or ChatGPT to learn about each technology individually. Always keep in mind that each technology has its pros and cons, so it depends on your needs.
Choosing your IDE
IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, and it’s where all the magic happens. Like technologies, there are many IDEs available, and it can be confusing to chose one. IDEs will help you write a more organized code, integrate plugins that will make your coding journey much easier, and highlight your code so it won’t be a boring script. These are a few IDEs that you can chose from:
- Visual Studio Code ( Personal Favourite )
- ATOM
- Notepad++
Code, code and code
So basically, this is the step where you start coding. My personal approach to learning how to code is mainly practical. Coding is a process of creating an art piece, yes it can be so logical, but it’s more than a mathematical formula. Every time you code, your coding skills grow more and more. Start by coding simple projects, not complicated ones, and make mistakes, mistakes will surely help you improve. This approach may take more time than learning how to code theoretically, but it will obviously help you build a strong base. Here are few advices to find small projects, and start writing your first lines of codes.
- Refer to code hubs and find open-source codes and try to read them and understand them. Websites like Github offer a strong database of codes from various developers, and all the codes available there are basically open-source where you can analyze each code and find projects to replicate and improve your coding-thinking skills.
- Follow projects-based courses. If you want to learn from online courses, i advice you to find courses that have a project-approach rather than courses that explains each function on each own. With projects you learn the methodology the developer is using to code each project. These kind of courses are widely available and can be. both free ( In Youtube ) or paid ( Udemy, etc … ).
Use Libraries
Most of the technologies, especially nowadays, utilizes libraries, which will help you create a modular app that utilizes pre-made libraries and will help you earn a lot of time. I personally advice to re-create these libraries at first just to learn how they’re made, this is will build you a good foundation, but later, you can surely use libraries to code and earn time. Many technologies have a package manager where you find all the available libraries, e.g :
- NPM is the package manager for all Node-based technologies, such as NodeJS, React, VUE, etc …
- PyPI is the package manager for Python, where you can install packages for a Python app.
Practice and improve your skills
Use platforms such as HackerRank to practice your skills in small coding challenges in the technologies you are interested in. These challenges will help you learn by mistakes, and expand your knowledge gradually. These platforms will also help you integrate into a vast community of developers where you communicate with like-minded people and people that are interested in the same areas as you.
Personally, these steps are the ones that i did when i started my coding journey long time ago. And it helped me a lot to build a strong foundation. And the most key advice to note from this blog post is to start now, what stops you from starting the journey is the act of not starting itself. Starting and consistency are the key notes.
