I have always been someone to believe that if I do not know something, I can go out and learn it. No matter the subject, difficulty, or circumstance.
Well, I guess not always. I can remember back in high school when I thought some calculus was quite difficult.
Regardless, my mindset has been improving, and I have learned a lot.
I began my journey of self-learning programming probably ~ 2 years ago, and it was scattered to say the least. Jumping from course to course and picking up whatever piqued my interest at the time. I’d jump from a course on building an app in Django to a course on building an app in React and Node.js. No real sequence or thought process went into my journey of learning to program.
Of course, inevitably, when I tried to build something on my own, I was completely lost. I had trained myself to copy code from someone else and tricked myself into thinking I was learning so much. I was in a place commonly known as “tutorial hell.” I even started getting down on myself.
I began to think that this learning to program thing would just not work, and it wasn’t quite for me. I had started too late. It would take me too long to get good. Many programmers start young, and it was too late for me.
In reality, what I should have been doing while taking courses was taking action. While I was working on a course or project, I should have slowed down. I should have taken a step back. I should have thought deeply about how all the pieces fit together and how one would go about building an application. I should have tried to build projects on my own, taken a leap of faith, a small one if anything.
I definitely have learned a lot in the journey and have made a ton of adjustments. Humans have always learned by action. You can’t expect to conduct a chemistry experiment by watching someone conduct one. At the same time, it’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’re learning.
The one thing I can say is to shut off that course, close that book, and go out and try and build something from scratch.
I hope this helps anyone attempting to self-learn programming or anything for that matter. I always love hearing from readers so feel free to reach out on twitter or email (abhin@abhin-sharma.com).
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Abhin Sharma 