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The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
- henryxie 14y agoTotally agree. Prototyping is all you need to test out a startup idea. And if you learn by doing, everything you learn is useful!
- waynengai8 14y agokeep blogging suneel....maybe this will finally get me to start learning!
- crisnoble 14y agoBest quote in the article: There are so many benefits to jumping right in. You’ll quickly get over any fear you may have of programming. You’ll start seeing the fruits of your labor right away.
- deveac 14y agoThis did it for me. I've been having this exact same thought for the past two weeks. After hitting development bottlenecks on my last project, I committed to learning to code to the point where I could hack together functional prototypes. I've been training by manual, and was just speaking with a friend about how dry it is and the fact that I'd be more fulfilled working on a project and couldn't wait for that. We have an extremely small, simple project that we've been talking about. Screw it. I'm dumping the book and starting on that as soon as I get home. Exactly what I needed to read.
- crisnoble 14y agoAwesome! I have been trying the same sort of thing and documenting it here: http://mksht.crisnoble.com http://mksht.crisnoble.com I was inspired by: http://mroosendaal.prosite.com/628/612/work/msced http://mroosendaal.prosite.com/628/612/work/msced and http://designitcodeit.com/ http://designitcodeit.com/ Plus Mig Reyes's quote "Just make a bunch of shit" or the more eloquent way that Ira Glass put it "the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions."
- deveac 14y agoIt is funny. I was talking to a kid that was learning to play guitar because he wanted to play cover songs, and was frustrated by the lessons that seemed to have nothing to do with what he wanted. I told him that he didn't have to wait even one more day, since playing covers songs is one of the best ways in which you learn guitar. His ultimate goal could be accomplished almost immediately by choosing one song he liked that only had 3 chords, and just strumming those three cords over and over again in succession until it didn't sound half bad. Would take less than a week, -tops. It's the same principle, and one I value highly. I think tackling a new discipline, and the wave of information that rushes toward you as you put your toe in the water can sometimes distract us from simple grounded approaches that we know have worked well for us in the past. Thank you for the links!
- andrewflnr 14y agoI learned piano in a similar way. It was a lot of fun, and allows me to play some songs passably, but I still feel hobbled by not knowing certain basic techniques that I would have learned sooner in a more conventional set of lessons. Maybe it comes after the "project" type learning, but at some point, to move up, you have to learn the boring basics.
- suneel0101 14y agoAgreed! I'm also a pianist, but because I started young, I was lucky that my parents and teacher forced to me practice technique all the time. You should check out the Liszt exercises, they will make you strong and fast: http://books.google.com/books/about/Liszt_Technical_Exercises_Complete.html?id=A4OVdTt3UMsC http://books.google.com/books/about/Liszt_Technical_Exercise... With coding, there was no such outside pressure, so until I joined Yipit, I had tons of bad, hacky habits. In order to get to the next level, I had to rebuild from the ground up and learn the fundamentals really well.
- deveac 14y agoI agree with this. I think the hardest part of learning a new skill is starting out. Working on a concrete problem provides a positive feedback loop that keeps you engaged, learning, and moving foreword. But that doesn't mean you should skip fundamentals. For coding you could hammer out a project, get familiar with a language and the technologies you used to implement it, then download a Stanford lecture on proper Programming Methodology.
- suneel0101 14y agoThis is such a nice comment and I'm glad my post could help! Good luck hacking on that project. Let us know how it goes. I'm sure you will learn a ton :)
- bradddd 14y agoGreat insight. Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. The stack that Suneel lays out is a good foundation for web dev, but as he admits, he like many others invested more time than was necessary in books/documentation/tutorials. More people need to just jump in. If you get to a point that you want a feature from jQuery, look it up and implement it, but don't feel like you need to wrap your mind around every feature before you can begin. Great work and keep at it.
- drcube 14y ago>Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. If there was a list of software projects somewhere, ordered by difficulty, with tips on how to get started and how to extend it later, I would be very interested. I can code (somewhat), but I find that any time I have an itch to scratch, it's much easier to google it and solve it through existing software and configuration changes. Every time I've had a project in mind, I'm quickly in over my head. I'd like to move beyond scripting and actually build self contained software I can post on Github and give to my friends, but I guess I don't know where is a reasonable place to start.
- manaskarekar 14y agohttp://mindprod.com/project/projects.html http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html
- bradddd 14y agoThat's a nice list to help people when brainstorming. I wasn't necessarily implying that the project had to be something new or different, or even specific to the user. A lot of people learn rails or django by making some microblogging twitter clone. On a recent relevant topic, sometimes the best ideas come from emulation and slight modification, so maybe you just challenge yourself to replicate a site or web app you use.
- noahc 14y ago
- albumedia 14y agoCongrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
- barking 14y agoI don't know why you were downvoted but there is definitely something to be said for what you argue.
- doktrin 14y agoAgreed. I am largely self taught as well, and have found a lot of value in reading texts on CS / programming fundamentals : * Computer Architecture * Operating Systems * Algorithms * Data Structures * Database Fundamentals * etc. In addition, more seminal-yet-not-directly-practical books such as SICP are quite valuable. I've been meaning to read TECS (a copy of which is staring at me as we speak), however I have not had the time to devote to its projects yet. Edited to add : In addition, reading up on web application architecture was quite helpful. This is increasingly important as modern frameworks may otherwise abstract away concepts to the point of making them very black-boxy. That said, my goal was not to rush towards an MVP or prototype. I intend to be a competent developer first, and a founder second. If these were reversed, I might well have adopted the OP's approach instead.
- nahname 14y agoAre these things that were helpful or got you started? I don't think anyone is challenging the value of studying those topics. It just seems to be general consensus you don't start with them.
- doktrin 14y agoI suppose it depends on how started is defined, but yes - having an understanding of the topics I mentioned preceded working as a junior developer.
- baseh 14y agoThis pretty much applies for any endeavor ; not just learning to code. Thanks for the post. 2 Biggest mistakes when learning to [TASK X] Mistake #1: I spent too much time learning things that I didn’t actually need. Mistake #2: I didn’t start [TASK X] right away.
- ashraful 14y agoMy biggest mistake was trying to decide which language was most suitable. I kept reading article after article about the advantages of ruby over python, or why nodejs is better than anything else. In the end I just ended up writing my prototype in PHP (ironically the language that no one recommended - and most hated) simply because it was so simple to jump right in and get started. More so because PHP ran on the server I used to host my static HTML/CSS files. My first side project is www.youfm.org and its doing great (150k hits, 40k uniques, hundreds of people spending over 5 hours on the site). So the most important advice I can give is to just pick a language and dive right in. Don't worry about the right language, don't worry about which is the easiest to learn, or scales the best, or anything like that. Just pick any one and start coding.
- webjunkie 14y agoYeah, away with all that crap, just use Django already! Good decision.
- c-oreills 14y agoI'd be wary of recommending Django to a beginner, unless their project definitely required it. Flask is lightweight, simple, and you can understand most of it in a very short period of time. I'd say it taught you to code more, whereas Django teaches you to use Django.
- olifante 14y agoBetter yet, use Express and focus on mastering one single language for the client-side and the server-side: either JavaScript or CoffeeScript.
- sunraa 14y agoAs much it pains me to admit it, Nikes' "Just Do It" applies here (and in life) as the author has learned. The procrastination and anxiety that comes with tackling something new can be overwhelming. The task oriented approach narrows focus and makes you think about what you need to learn. Fear is also a great motivator especially when your lead is breathing down your neck with a 'JGID - just get it done' attitude. :)
- njharman 14y agoYMMV But I typically do #1 when learning / starting anything I don't know about. That is I some proportional amount of time googling/wiki reading/pinging friends for all the info/standards/tools/libs around subject. Review* them for worth, spend more time with ones that pass. It is very helpful to have a idea of the breadth of and resource for a subject. Review typically means "experimental coding". The 2nd point "start coding now" is a Truism. Just don't start coding "production". Learn some, think, first.
- MojoJolo 14y agoThey say you learn best through experience. I learned CakePHP by coding my thesis with it. Now, I wanted to learn python + postgres by planning to port my thesis to it.
- at-fates-hands 14y agoI think the problem is a lot of people jump in, start coding and then never go back and learn about the nuances of a language. Case in point was myself when I was learning Javascript. Sure, I could get the JS to do what I wanted, but it was clunky, used a lot of memory and was slow. Fast forward a few years and I've gone back and read Crockford's books several times, and with more studying, I've gotten much better at writing JS. I now try and make my JS as lean and as fast as possible. It's a totally different approach then when I started. The problem is thinking once you know how to do something, you're done. Like a friend once told me, "You don't learn to be a programmer, you learn to be a student of the language you choose."
- prawks 14y agoThis goes hand-in-hand with people writing lots of code (especially when first starting out) and not reading much. There seems to be a huge lack of people simply reading code to learn from it, rather than poring through dozens of recommended "Learn to Program in X in 7 Days!". A novelist probably reads more than they write; the same is rarely the case for programers (at least in my experience, especially in the case of people who are less pedantic than others).
- dwoot 14y agoYou make some valid points. However, had you not taken the road you did, the material you read much later on probably wouldn't have made much sense and probably could have made you turn away from it all right at the start, right? You get excited when you see results right away. Once you do enough things that begin to make you wonder, "Gee, there's gotta be a way to do this faster or more efficiently." When your curiosity drives you to search for answers is when you delve much deeper into the nuances and the grit of a language that becomes important for scale.
- suneel0101 14y agoYou're right, there's always some retrospective bias, but I'll never get back those days of reading about PHP, since reading Python accomplished the same and actually was much nicer for a beginner. The truth is, your MVP will evolve and will require you to learn things, new languages and new technologies. The fun is never over. For me it's continuing and im so glad of that.
- sophacles 14y agoI don't know that #1 was a mistake. When getting into any new field, it is very hard to tell what is important and what isn't, what is a solution to the problem and what isn't. If you are in school, sure they'll guide you, but if you are self-learning, there is no really good filter. So learn about everything. Take a breadth-first approach. Some of the specifics you learn will be wrong, useless, or otherwise inappropriate. However, getting an understanding as to why they aren't relevant is in fact learning the field. The more information about a topic you have in your head, the more likely you are to see the connections between subfields, how various bits are important and unique or just ho-hum standard implementations. I regularly see people in some niche area say "look we have found this amazing new way to handle the data-flood", only to tell them they have reinvented NoSQL or a message queue, or a technique for dealing with matrices that the image processing or simulation folks have been doing for years (and all of them poorly, making recognizable mistakes). A breadth-first overview has much advantage.
- xster 14y agoAgreed. It's easy to look back and know what were needed in retrospect but it's hard to even know which is for what until some time is spent to learn its capabilities
- elchief 14y agoWell, you need to know what is out there, and what is possible. So at least skim over some of the technologies. You could waste a lot of time if you didn't know say, Sass, existed. There's also a timing problem. If you invest now, and learn technology T, then when you are in the middle of developing a project, the marginal cost of using T is very low. But if you are up to your neck in a project, and then need to take a week off to learn T, you are not likely to do so. Personally, when re-starting my tech career I wish I had learned Java (or any JVM language) over PHP, PostgreSQL over MySQL, and Dojo over JQuery.
- dwoot 14y agosuneel, many people make this mistake. I went almost EXACTLY the same route you did. Although, I had already known HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, I was wildly unprepared for what I would encounter next just to learn how to get a working prototype. It basically took me 8 months before I got something running on Heroku. I went through four different Django books with some success here and there, including the Django Project's simple Poll tutorial three times without grasping it. Little to my understanding, all of it made sense once I used the book written by one of the creators of Django himself. I also used a lot of StackOverflow and the guys hanging out in #Python and #Django Freenode IRC channels were awesome!!! The trial and error got me to learn a lot of things. In addition to the six things that you've listed, I forced myself to learn VIM as well. You probably use VirtualEnv, which you've forgotten to list. Anyway, it's always good to see others going down the same road and sharing their experiences. Do you have some links to some of your early projects?
- estebank 14y agoI disagree slightly, as I don't think that following that path of reading instead of jumping in is inherently worse. Just jumping into writing code is great for motivational reasons because you'll have something tangible, something to be proud about and to help you get excited and keep learning. But you'll still lack insight in a lot of the surrounding environment, things that any programmer should know. Attempting to do this the other way, reading as much as possible and as in depth as possible, will be good to give you some insight, but you'll have nothing to show for it until you start coding and it'll still take time for you to learn some stuff that can only really be understood with practice. What I'm trying to get at is that it doesn't really matter how you start, as you are going to have to dedicate 10,000 hours to learn, polish and excel at any craft.
- mikeryan 14y agoThis is actually just 1 mistake. Start writing code, make it do what you need it to do today. This will focus your efforts to what you need to do at the present moment and you won't end up trying to figure out how to deploy an app you haven't built yet.
- SatvikBeri 14y agoI've had a completely different experience. The first few times I tried to write code, I learned only what I needed to know for the specific app. I hated it. It seemed like I was just learning a bunch of random syntax and beating them into shape. Later, I actually tried the textbook first approach, and this worked much better for me. By learning the framework and being able to observe the patterns, learning new commands was much easier and I could often guess at exactly what I'd need to do. I also remembered commands for much longer than I did with the first approach. YMMV, but some people have more theory-centric learning styles and some have more application-centric. Test and figure out what works for you.
- burntwater 14y agoI wonder if the advent of web programming makes this process all the more confusing? When I took basic Java and VB programming courses in college 10 years ago, we focused only on Java and VB. There was no HTML, CSS, JS, frameworks, etc. And you could have a complete, functioning program with GUI from the start. Now, to create a web app, you have to learn all those other things in addition to Ruby, or Python, or PHP. As you advance in skills you'll likely move to either front-end or back-end, but when you start out creating everything from scratch, it feels like there's so much more. (This coming from someone who did IT work for the 10 years following college, and is not trying to break into the web developing world).
- GrueFiend 14y agoKnuth hath said: "A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer." I agree with that sentiment. The whole "focus on what works" is not the same thing as "understanding what the hell you're doing."
- logn 14y agoI think you can reduce the list a lot more--and should. I'd choose a single language and learn it well and go from there. And I'd only work the command line features. So Ruby on the command line or JS or Java would be my choices (but only one).
- goggles99 14y agoYou put the cart before the horse (which was actually your first mistake). When you get out of college - get a job, work a while - then start a side business. Your startup success odds will more than quadruple following this advice.
- yotamoron 14y agoThis is bs. No one learns how to code in one year. You bearly scratch the surface. If a musician or a dancer would write about their experiences after one year of playing/dancing, it would be laughable, yet with programming, for some reason, it is acceptable. You know almost nothing about programming after doing it for one year.
- tedmiston 14y agoIt's easy to worry about every details and learn every piece of tech yourself all at once, but it's a recipe for unstable foundations and disasters of distraction. Creating small achievements by prototyping simple ideas in unfamiliar technologies gives me small, concrete rewards to celebrate the journey.
- russell 14y agoAsk a developer who is working in the area that you are interested in to give you some guidance. My girlfriend decided to become a web designer. Do she asked an experienced developer, me. I said HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery. She added Photoshop and some image creation tools. She learned the parts I suggested and decided to go to a community college to get some focus. (Actually, she originally signed up to get the student discounts on the software.) In a few months she will get a job to get some practical experience. Then she will tackle her own projects.
- bitwize 14y agoStep 1 in learning to code: 10 PRINT "COCKS" 20 GOTO 10 Step 2 in learning to code: 10 INPUT "How many cocks do you want",C 20 FOR I = 1 TO C 30 PRINT "8===========D" 40 NEXT I I'm not recommending that your first steps into programming be in BASIC, or involve cocks. (On both accounts I would recommend the exact inverse.) But this is how a million programmers got started: useless programs that amused us. Never, ever, ever underestimate a useless program, especially for beginners. The author of this article seemed to want to focus on building a prototype for his Web startup. And that's fine, as a long-term goal. But if you're brand new to the world of programming it's probably a good idea to start with the basics, like printing or drawing stuff on the screen, doing some simple (or, later mor complicated) mathematics, or munging or transforming data in interesting ways. This helps keep the budding programmer focused on the patterns and "shape" of their language, which knowledge they can then later direct to a specific purpose like Web or smartphone apps.
- pbreit 14y agoI totally disagree. I can't stand tutorials or classes that present useless stuff as exercises. It's so much easier to work on something that you can at least imagine would have some value. And it is much, much easier to work on something that you think is either cool or have always wanted to build, etc. Also, 1/2 a downgrade for the lame, childish example.
- olliesaunders 14y agoYour standard for the importance of things being useful might be slightly out of perspective when you consider the main goal here is to learn: when you first start programming it doesn’t matter what the program does just as long as it did something, you understood it, and you can build on that knowledge to the next thing. That’s why we start with Hello World.
- eitland 14y agoStill I think his point is relevant. For a lot of people the fact that something is useful contributes a whole lot to the motivation for learning it.
- KirinDave 14y agoIf you have been starting to write code and study code for a year, you are still learning to code. You have not learned to code, you are not even a journeyman yet. I've been in the industry about 9 years, and coding since I was a child. My parents caught me staying up late with a flashlight under the covers as a teenager reading books on C instead of nudie mags. My first program with an event-driven UI ran on a NeXT Color Station. This is not to brag, it's to say I've been doing this basically since I could decide what to do, and I still have a lot to learn about coding, computer science and software engineering. So you've made your third biggest mistake; you've vastly underestimated what you are in for. You have never "learned" to program, you are "learning." Every year will ask you to acquire new skills and use new models and learn new domains.
- suneel0101 14y agoAbsolutely right, there's no end to it. What I hope the reader will achieve is the basic ability to prototype their ideas. That's where I am. In no way do I think I've learned all there is to code. Every day I'm learning precisely how little I know. Heck, I just started learning Lisp and truly enjoying how unfamiliar and powerful functional programming can be.
- KirinDave 14y ago"Heck, I just started learning Lisp and truly enjoying how unfamiliar and powerful functional programming can be." Try Haskell before you have too many preconceptions of what "should" be to burn away. :)
- suneel0101 14y agoSounds good :)
- sopooneo 14y agoA recovering non-coder?
- eitland 14y ago
- lhnn 14y agoTo Generalize (for web): HTML/CSS/JS (View) jQuery (View Framework, couldhave been YUI, for example) Programming language Framework in said language I still think actual SQL / DB knowledge is requisite to do all but the most minor of apps, but he is specifically trying to get people from being overwhelmed. I'm struggling with Play!, because I need to know HTML/CSS/Java/Scala subset (templates)/EBean ORM/the massive library that is Play. Just a simple app touches on so many libraries and helper functions, it's hard to get a grasp of what's going on. I don't even build a form anymore, I build a form-ish object that I pass to the controller that fills in data to the ORM that inserts stuff into the database. o_O
- mikecane 14y agoEveryone out there who wants to learn to code, stop reading these comments and use the time to just go learn!