My First Blog Post

I want to code but where do I start?

A bit about me

Hi I’m Maria, I’ve been teaching myself to code since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when I was furloughed from my full time job in the travel industry. More recently I was accepted as a She Codes Plus 2021 participant.

I decided to write a blog to share my experience and journey in learning to code as I was so overwhelmed with the thousands of resources available when I started and had no idea where to begin. This made me reflect on the two main things I wish I had done before starting out to code.

Make a plan - pick a coding topic and stick to it.

Learn how to learn! Specifically learn how you learn and if you feel like you can’t learn from a resource it’s probably not because you can’t learn but that the particular learning style isn’t for you.

Making a plan .. and sticking to it!

When I started out coding I signed up to a data science course, a Google IT support course, an introduction to Computer Science course and a web development course. Oh yes, there was also that maths course. I love learning and I love to have lots of things going on at once, it keeps me engaged and interested, but I very quickly learned that I was getting very good at starting and not really getting anywhere.

My goal was to work in tech, the tech industry is huge, and to be completely honest I had no idea what I wanted to do or where to start. I decided to pick web development and then go from there. I’m a big believer from my job in travel technology that if you can get your head around one system then you can apply the foundations to another so I was hoping that would be the case in my coding journey and that I could bring any prior learning to a new topic I was interested in.

Learning How to Learn

So I now had my topic, anyone that has self learned web development knows there are so many resources available. So how do you pick which one works for you? My biggest tip would be to work out what kind of learner you are. I went through a few courses (and a few months) before I found one that worked for me. If you are already working through a course and you are not grasping it. It might not be that web development isn’t for you, it might be that the particular course you are working through doesn’t match your learning style.

So how do you learn how to learn? My first course was from Codecademy, I felt like I was copying along and never actually getting anywhere substantial in order for me to actually do this in real life. My second course was with the Odin Project, which I loved as I felt like I was actually learning how to code and gaining real world skills. I did that alongside FreeCodeCamp for a while, another great resource for practicing what you have learned. Then it got to a point in the course where I was reading very long articles after very long article and I hit a wall. That’s when I found a podcast from Barbara Oakley on ‘Learning how to Learn’ and a lightbulb moment happened. It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of coding, it was that I was trying to learn with a resource that just didn’t work for my particular learning style.

I found out that I am an audio visual learner, who learns by doing and discovered another resource Scrimba. Scrimba is an interactive learning experience where you have short videos that you can pause, rewind and fast forward the speed of the instructor, while coding in their interactive coding platform at the same time. My whole coding journey changed and I completed my first ever course, a Javascript Bootcamp. Coding was making sense and I was loving the learning.

Maybe if I had read this blog before I started to code I would have saved myself a few months at least in my journey. Plus some pauses in between while I worked out what I was doing. For now I am happily coding alongside other learners and will share my coding journey as I go along.

Thanks for reading. :)