Things you can consider if you are starting out in programming

First things first, I am still a newbie, and this is my first time writing a blog so please bare me with me. I just want to at least share my experience when I started to self-study programming and hopefully share my knowledge. Enough of that introduction, let’s get into it! 😃

1. Do not watch too many tutorials

Watching tutorials aren’t bad but relying on them is the problem. This is what we call the Tutorial Hell. I started learning programming with zero knowledge last August and I used to watch this Old Java Tutorial Playlist all day, even though I didn’t understand anything, I kept on watching. (I remember raging on what is the purpose of that constructor lol) Later on, when I want to make something, like a hobby project, I didn’t know how to start, what to do, how to structure my code, and so on. So, if you are a visual learner and still want to watch tutorials, it’s okay, just make sure that you still practice hands-on.

💡 Scrimba is good if you want to learn interactively (This is where I learned the basics of React!)

2. Do not write too many notes

This is the first thing I noticed as soon as I’m getting a grasp of programming, back then I used to write every single thing I see from the tutorial, the sample codes, and the explanation and now I rarely use those notes. So, if you are writing notes make sure that it is your explanation and must be concise because you can just look up anything on Google, but that explanation of yours is something that you can easily understand.

3. Do not be afraid to ask

Always ask someone who has more experience than you, they might already encounter the problem you have. When I was starting I always wanted to do things alone, if I don’t understand something, I’ll just look it up on Google instead of asking someone because the voice in my head says that if you ask them, they might look down on you. This mindset might prevent you from progressing.

4. Stick to one programming language

Do not try to learn all programming languages, or even do language hopping (I did this before) I started from Java -> Python -> Kotlin -> Javascript and then realized I shouldn’t be doing this. That’s why I stick into Javascript.

Just pick a language you want to focus on, learn the fundamentals, go deep dive on it and later on if you’ll ever need to switch to a new programming language perhaps because of work/school requirements, it will be way easier for you.

5. Blackbox topics you think might be needed in the future

First of all, what does “Blackbox topics” mean? it means putting topics you think you might need into something like a space in your brain and just caching it for later use. I’ll give you an example, I did this and made my progress more faster and efficient.

While you are learning frontend development, you make projects here and there until you can say that you already mastered frontend but do you know how backend works? can you be a web developer without knowing about backend stuff? Of course not. So what you can do is while learning frontend and making projects with only frontend, you can look upon topics like “How backend development works”, “Why do we need a backend”, etc. By doing so, you already have a background about the things you need to learn next and making it easy to absorb by the time you are learning about backend development. More info here