Credit for the image above.

Note: This post was last edited on Mar 31, 2022.

Last month or so, a brilliant classmate of mine brought up the idea of coding tuitions after I explained my research to him. That got me thinking, how the heck did I get to this point in my programming journey?

I hope to give a brief description of my ~2-years learning programming, and what I would have done differently.

My journey

My journey started with Python. All you need to know about Python is found in this part of the Zen of Python:

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.

However, a good portion of my programming journey has been in front-end web development (as evident by my GitHub repositories) as I found it was a tangible way to get my ideas out to the world.

I am still a student of programming, trekking my way through freeCodeCamp's curriculum even after all of these projects.

What I would have done differently

The two biggest mistakes I made while learning were:

• I got stuck in 'tutorial hell' plenty of times, speeding up YouTube videos and copying code verbatim, not understanding what any of it meant.
• I gave up way too easily. I gave up finishing the freeCodeCamp curriculum previously, which has set me back about half a year.

Regarding 'tutorial hell', what got me out of it was actually making projects on GitHub just for the heck of it, learning so many technologies and best practices along the way.

Afterword

After finishing a few projects, I realized how much I still have left to learn, so I restarted my FCC curriculum, earning three certificates so far!

If someone asked me what to do if they wanted to learn programming, I would tell them something along the lines of:

1. Finish FCC's curriculum.
2. Go out there and make some projects!