Share your Experience as A Beginner in Coding

I was 13 years old and it was in the late 1990s. I got a book called "Borland C++ Builder 4.0" from the discount bin of the bookstore and was trying to figure out what this was. I thought I was coding in C++ but it was like an IDE (that I later found out was a "visual tool" to help in writing code). I made some forms with buttons and text where you could click buttons and have numbers go up inside the form. I remember double clicking on the button and snippets of code would popup to edit. I had no clue what the heck was going on what I was doing. But that was a seed and I later went on to do: 1. Lego Mindstorms (which was programming in disguise) 2. UNIX command line stuff for installing Windows from scratch on a really old computer 3. A week long Java enrichment course in high school 4. Programming in high school where I learned QBASIC (this is the first time I learned what code was for real starting from scratch). Then VBASIC afterwards, where I built a pong game using buttons. 5. Java course in high school where I built a project for hockey teams to draft players 6. Then I started college and did real computer science fundamentals, like DS&A, operatings systems, databases, distributed systems, graphics, HCI, computer architecture, etc... So I would say it took a lot of banging my head against the wall and having no clue what the heck I was doing for 8 years before I even started understanding code. I would try to repeat this process of banging your head against the wall until I figure something out on my own, but in a much more efficient way haha. The problem with Coding Bootcamps is you bang your head against the wall but you don't get space to figure it out on your own, you just keeping banging your head over and over and things never click.

I'm really biased here because my company's vision is that adaptive learning is the answer for learning efficiently. I find that everyone has different "aha" moments and everyone learns at their own pace and style. We're very early so before we solve this for learning to code for everyone haha I recommend trying a bunch of free and cheap options of different styles and seeing what sticks. I also recommend doing the same topics over and over until they click instead of just doing ONE course. - cheap well respected Udemy courses - free or cheaper Coursera courses - finding a YouTube teacher you like - Odin Project - FreeCodeCamp - CS50 - Audit some Stanford CS courses online - Work on large open source - Build your own product and ship it to real people - Codecademy

Cool, I’m happy to chat async here or on LinkedIn, but I avoid doing calls so I can multitask and be hyper responsive online.