How to Start Coding!
So, you want to start coding! Congratulations! Although Donald Glover told us to learn coding in 2013, coding only seems to be getting more popular by the year. Coding can be a great way to theme your Bigcartel site, automate transcribing your video content, or even make some money on the side. It can be a great way o expressing your creativity or empowering your existing workflows. I originally started coding to make cool apps and make a career out of it. Though many choose to code for its obvious financial benefit you don't have to want to make or join the coolest startup to learn to code. Additionally, this info is a bit biased toward applications and scripts, and less to math and theoretical programming work.
Why are you coding? To really stick with coding you may need to keep in mind the reason you started. For loops were absolutely terrifying in the beginning and if it weren't for my love for apps, I wouldn't have persisted. Interrogate or discover your reason for coding. What is your use case for coding? Making apps? Automating excel workflow? Designing Shopify themes. Working for Apple? The closer you are to why you want to code the easier it is to look up specific tutorials and easier to stay with coding over time. The question when coding becomes can you sustain coding over the duration of a project or timeline. Ask yourself what are your goals? If you want to code as a career or freelancer what are your goals within a year? 5 interviews? 2 clients a month? Asking questions and guide expectations doesn't need to be super drawn out, but give some thought to what you want to do with your newly acquired skill.
What are you coding? Closely related to why what you are coding helps to narrow resources for what you are creating. For example Postgres databases need to be 'hosted' or always on and ready for requests to persist data as opposed to maybe a simple HTML+CSS+Javascript which can be opened in most browsers. If you are curious about what you may potentially be able to create here are some ideas: Theme for Tumblr & Myspace, Streamdeck Stock Ticker, Scraping info from websites, Unity Game Development (Among Us), Getting data from Twitch (SullyGnome). Though working for a company, whether it's a small agency or a FORTUNE 500, will require you to code as if you were making applications for yourself or learning something like Java, but you may need to learn some theory like Data Structures and Algorithms. But also learning these things outside of a career context could help you scale applications and products.
How are you coding? To actually start coding you'll need a specific language, resources to learn from, and you will need a code editor of sorts. A language is the syntax or rules in which you will build your code. Javascript, Go, C++ are languages for example. You may not need to learn just one language when you start, but it helps to get really comfortable in a language and its patterns and basically learn the syntax of another later. If you are lost on what language to choose still you can Google the top 10 programming languages and pick one that feels right to you, but depending on how the language is used may alter your choice in using it, like with Swift on a Windows PC. You will need resources to learn from to start putting your what into practice. I recommend a couple of places:
Youtube or Google: Search `(language of your choice)` tutorial or your specific project in mind.
Codecademy: A self-paced text-based learning platform. Not everything on the platform is free anymore.
FreeCodeCamp: Codecademy, but free
Stack Overflow: Not really to learn, but to copy snippets. You will be here a lot.
Github: Hosting platform for enterprise and open source code could be good to learn patterns from, but not nearly as accessible as the other resources.
After you have looked into your resources you will need a code editor or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which makes handling certain languages a lot easier. I recommended VSCode, TextMate, or Notepad++. You can use whatever the language will allow and feel the most comfortable with, but you can switch at any time you want. For example: for Javascript/Nodejs projects Glitch is an online IDE you can use! With this information, you should be able to go out and start coding!
After you have started you may want to share and find spaces with others who code. For sharing web apps I recommend Github, Glitch, or self-hosting (which is out of scope for this). For software, I recommend compiling versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux if possible. You may not be able to share a 'live' version of your app on these platforms so you may need to Google anything specific. Also, (find) great spaces for others whose code can be found on Twitter or Community Discord Spaces!