One Year

Matthew Fan
Dec 24, 2020

December 2020 marks my first full year of coding.

I first started coding back in 8th grade when I took a programming course offered by my school and learned Visual Basic. After that I learned some HTML, CSS, and Javascript (copy and pasting from Stack Overflow) in highschool. At the start of college, all of the coding I did was just for school assignments. I knew I wanted to get into programming at an early age, but never really dug deep into it. December 2019 was important because it was the moment that I took the initiative to learn more on my own. It was the moment that marked the next full year of coding my own side projects and learning new technologies. Looking back on it, I realize I was able to learn so much in a relatively small amount of time and I am proud of myself for this small accomplishment.

I wanted to write this blog post to share some of the tips I gathered along the way - I hope you find them helpful!

  1. Use online courses effectively. This full year of coding was started by the first Udemy course I finished: The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele. Because of this, I highly recommend starting with video courses if you want to get into programming, since they give you a better outlook on how the different technologies relate to each other. Using these courses effectively means not just simply following along to what the instructor is doing, but rather actively thinking about why they are doing certain things. And once the course is over, don’t just move on to the next one and consume online courses on an infinite loop, but rather apply what you learned to your own projects. Learning is much more motivational when you are building something that you came up with on your own.
  2. Make what you want to make. When thinking of a project to take on, I often find myself struggling with coming up with a really complex idea that will look good on my resume. However, it is important to make what you want to make, not what you think others will want to see. If you start a project that you are actually passionate and excited about, it has a much greater chance of becoming a full-fledged, large scale project that you can be proud of.
  3. Take breaks. I stalk the GitHub contribution graph too much. I like that it shows the progress I have been making throughout the year (and it even sparked the creation of this blog post), but it also gives me anxiety when there is a large gap of no commits. Looking back at these gaps now, I am glad I took those breaks. They gave me some time to recover from burnout and think of another project idea that I would like to truly work on. Don’t feel bad about having a month long break and don’t force yourself to work on something you don’t want to, you will just end up developing a bad relationship with coding. Here is a good video by mayuko that can help encourage you to take that much needed break.
  4. Learn a little bit of everything. At the start, it is important to expand your knowledge by breadth, instead of depth. There are so many different fields within coding and finding which one you like is only possible by experimenting with a little bit of everything. Be open to trying new things and if a couple of weeks go by and you realize you don’t like it, feel free to move on. Those weeks weren’t wasted since you a) are closer to finding what you are really passionate about, b) know enough where you can talk about it with others who work with it extensively, and c) maybe impress people with how much you know ;)
  5. Don’t take it too seriously. You are coding because you enjoy it. I sometimes get too caught up in looking at what other people do and forget that I am coding because I want to. Have some fun with your learning experience, don’t compare yourself to others, and build something wacky.

Conclusion

Those were most of the tips I wanted to share with y’all today. If I come up with anymore in the future, I will be sure to update this post with them!

Although I am still very young and have not coded that much relative to others, I still feel like I learned so much in this past year. I not only learned about the various technologies out there, but also learned a lot about myself and what I want. Hopefully I will continue this blog long enough to write a year two post :)

See ya!

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