Learn how to teach yourself to code

A lot of people have asked me how I ended up doing what I do for a living — coding. And more importantly, how they can do it too!

There is a lot of mystery around what kind of person you should be or what kind of an education you would need to have. But I firmly believe there are only 3 key requirements you actually need:

• Interest
• Patience
• 3–6 months of time (at least 20 hours a week)

The first point should be self-explanatory. If you generally don’t have any interest in making websites, web apps, or just any general curiosity about self-driving cars, Amazon’s speedy delivery or how to make your own Netflix-like video player you might be left behind pretty quickly.

Patience is also a huge factor in programming, especially early on when you see more walls around you than doorways. Being able to focus on only one task for a long time will be rewarding eventually. If you are worried about not having enough patience you can train yourself!

Take smaller challenges, do more simple projects on your own (don’t, just don’t for the love of god start learning Angular, React or any other frameworks JUST yet).

For example, if you are learning about how to create a simple website, don’t try and tackle any parallax features or crazy animations as your first project. Just think of a simple CV page where you just try and add your profile picture and a bio. Trust me, it will be complex enough once you start adding colors or when you try to position your image in the exact place you want it. But it’s at least a very achievable goal and once you are done you WILL feel like you’ve accomplished something. Then go ahead and tackle animations. =)

Time is unfortunately something that not a lot of us have control over. Maybe you’re a parent, have loans to pay off, or want to move out of your parent’s house. Unfortunately, I have to be strict with my 3–6 months learning period just because you won’t be able to see progress before that and to feel confident enough to start applying for that junior or intern position at your local software development agency or startup.

Ideally you have 8–10 hours every day, but if not I would say a minimum of 20 hours per week. This time can be broken into a series of 3–5 hours with no more than a few days of break in between is super critical. You will need to read a lot of articles, documentation, watch videos, etc. Along with the theory, you will need to have a lot of coding practice hours as well.

So try to take that extra savings money, stay a bit longer at your parent’s place or just reduce all your fun and social activities to a bare minimum. Do go for a walk though.

After you have met the 3 key requirements, the next steps should be easier.

Essentially, you could follow these steps if you want to learn how to make web applications such as Medium:

• pick a few learning websites (Pluralsight, CodeAcademy, Code School etc.) and complete 3–4 beginner topics (HTML, CSS, JS) from start to finish
• then choose another more advanced tutorial where they present how to do a simple website or a simple web application
• try coding a simple website or a simple Todo app yourself (keep it simple, just a list where you add ‘fake’ data via javascript events is already impressive enough)
• read a lot of articles (Smashing Magazine is great for insight about good practices and trends.) about what you just learned
  go back to the tutorials and this time choose more advanced ones
• now add newly-learned advanced stuff and improve your already made website or Todo app (Example: Add more styling, change the fonts or make animations or try some fun stuff with JavaScript)
• at this point you might grab a book (Eric Elliott already did a great job at curating this list)
• repeat the process until you don’t have the confidence or knowledge (no, seriously, once you know you don’t know is when you’ve finally learned something) to move past these steps =)

Good luck!