I am bad at coding, please help!
How many times you haven’t felt this way?
How many times you’ve looked at your code and had the feeling of being the worst programmer in the world?
And finally, how many times have you had the feeling if you are a junior like me, that you maybe, just maybe, took the wrong path to programming and you are just “not for it”?
The other day I received a message in my Twitter inbox that literally said this:
“Please help me I want to get into web development, I know basic Html and CSS, but I’m so bad…
I feel like falling into an empty void I’m such a failure”.
This is a desperate cry for many of us but I know I am not alone. Some developers are programming for more than a decade and still feel that they need to improve.
Hi, I am Luc, a front-end developer and this is one of the many articles about my journey into web development.
Without further due, let’s get into it:
I don’t have 20 years of experience as I started late, at 42, in 2019, but I noticed something that preoccupied me at the beginning in the field. One of the problems that most people are facing when it comes to programming, is a lack of confidence. I consider myself someone who knows how to administrate emotions, as having four kids the tendency is to go crazy if you don’t learn how to hold tight and put things together. Even with that, when I started to code I felt overwhelmed. There were new things every day, and it always will be this way in this industry. But the same ways are coming, the same way are going… look at Deno (the runtime for JavaScript), it came out in May 2020, and in 2 weeks I haven’t heard anything about it since.
Start to code.
When I started the HTML and wrote the first “Hello World” I felt like an entire universe had opened to me. To find later that HTML is just a scratch to the surface of what coding is. I had a “this will never end” feeling and from that moment I knew in a way that I will never regret choosing this path. I understood I needed time to get experience and I set a schedule and a weekly goal(s). To thrive, for me, the best strategy is to set a weekly goal. Let’s say that I want to learn loop in JavaScript, what I do is read the documentation about it, watch a tutorial, read articles, and apply what I’ve learned. Thus the info gets stuck in my brain. Even after one month of no use, I remember how it work ‘cause I grasped the basic. But again, this is just me and you may find a better way of doing it.
Learn the fundamentals.
Back in 2019, I was insecure, I didn’t know where to start or how to continue. I had bought an Udemy course on “full-stack dev” just to find later that the title of “full-stack” in the instructor’s mind had a different meaning than mine, and it was from 2015 and thus outdated. I decided to give it a go even so. I turned that disadvantage into an opportunity. As the version of jQuery and more of the Boostrap were outdated in the course I had to learn by reading the documentation. The JavaScript intro was just that: an intro. I gave up on learning with that course and went to another course in JavaScript. It didn’t make any sense to my brain. So I turned back to PHP and it started to make sense. If you want to know more about this experience I wrote an article about it …of course I did,? since I am documenting my journey.
Learning the fundamentals is the best of choices as libraries change, language updates, and frameworks remain in oblivion.
Don’t just code more, code better! (and don’t feel bad at coding)
I saw this reply in one of my recent tweets and I loved it. I wondered how can I improve and asked myself: ” how can I code better?”
So, I started to dig. Internet is like a gold mine, the more you dig the more treasure you find, so I put together some of the most important strategies, but without expanding them:
- read other programmer’s code;
- comment on your code as less as possible and when you do, write meaningful comments;
- fall in love with code refactoring;
- write documentation for large comments;
- avoid global code (like variables, or loops);
I was surprised to find that some of the practices above I were following without knowing they have been put into the “Best Practice” list code. Again, this is not a technical article so I added the ones I found most important at the time. You may find other great practices that help you on your journey.
And as you grow in knowledge and advance into the industry, document your journey. It doesn’t have to be by writing articles at the beginning, you could write notes that will eventually in the future convert into articles thus you’d have the option to come back in the later future and see your coding journey
Credit photo: Freepik