How much coding did you know before starting your own side project/startup?

You learn as you go, and you begin to think of code-based solutions to the problems you face for your very project, as opposed to mindlessly following a tutorial building a Todo list where they lay everything out for you so you don't have to think about it.

You will know what you need to do to overcome a specific hurdle, but won't have a clue how to execute it in code. But that's when you start to dig into Google, Stack Overflow and other communities for whichever tech you are using to find answers and solutions to your current issue. It's a lot of trial and error, but you gradually build up your knowledge.

And before you know it you have produced something that just works, as you wanted it to.

You'll look back at the code, once you have learned more and more, and realise how bad and thrown together it is, but it's all part of the process!

The basic advise is just start and figure it out as you progress. But with the technology stack you know in the beginning instead of learning something new.

But you can also try to have a thorough search bedore starting, to figure out what you need to build your solution. A shortcut would be to look for online courses or free YouTube videoes that might make it easier for to ship your product faster.

Wish you all the best!

I am not a professional developer. I started knowing just basic self-taught HTML and CSS, and over the years have dabbled in enough python to become proficient. Each time I’ve built something I felt I didn’t have enough knowledge to put it all together. But I would generally follow tutorials and guides for components of the overall system then splice it all together. It’s got me to a reasonably proficient point where I can throw together an MVP in Flask and Python and improve it iteratively.

I’d say just give it a shot

I knew a little javascript from copy/pasting Google Ads scripts and doing some codeacademy but my knowledge of sites was propped up by Wordpress themes etc. I could probably tell you what an if statement was, and had no clue what const, let, fat arrows, waterfalls and debugging meant.

Got frustrated with not being able to build what I needed so bought some Stephen Grider courses on udemy - I was between jobs at the time so I blasted through them all, and ended up realising that I loved development in the process.

I knew what I wanted to build, but not how to build it - Googled my questions, practiced what I learned and fell down the rabbit hole shortly afterwards.

When I started on my 1st project/startup years ago, I knew coding in a team but not creating a complete project. So I used an open sourced ecommerce package and created my first ecommerce site. With my 2nd startup, I used another app/site as a framework and modified the hell out to fit my need. It worked for 6 years with 1 major update before I hired a freelancer to rewrite it completely. I still can't create a whole site:-) Now it is time for another rewrite. This time, I will be working with a much better programmer for the new version:-) I enjoy coding as a hobby, but I want to spend the time on the business instead of all the technical stuff: functionalities, performance, hosting, cloud, etc.

There are multiple schools of thought on that "feeling". For example progress from several small to several medium, and go recursive on that. Or several small to not so several medium and repeat.

When you make the choice of entering the territory of "own side project / startup". My personal advise to you given your tone, work in a pre-funded startup first. When you are no more in a position to say "I have 'several' ideas which I 'want' to work on", it would be a good time to jumpship.

Yeah, been there done that. Spent many sleepless nights with all that creativity trying to burst out, but then lacking the skills to build the empires.

Start small try and pick a project that fits within your skill sets. If you don't have the skills to write the next Netflix, GitHub or BaseCamp then don't even try. Instead of trying to solve the next big thing in technology do something like a tutorial series on you learning and teaching other people to learn something that you're interested in and sell that thing as an "info-product", e-book, or online course. Keep it small and get it done.

Most of the side projects are by products of my learning spree.

I believe that the idea of learning everything from scratch is not practical. Because there are plenty of frameworks and tools available in the market, you will hardly have time to learn them all. So it is recommended to choose a single framework to learn(if have to ) and then try building tools.

When I know basic CRUD :)

The most expedient way to learn new skills is out of necessity. It makes a lot of sense to learn as you go. Wouldn't recommend this for a fully fledged web framework (like a web backend framework) though, had a few bad experiences doing that.

I got a degree in Computer Engineering so I knew quite a bit about "coding". However, the vast majority of the stuff I did in school was in C and the projects we did were with embedded software development and super low-level things. I'm now building a SaaS application and knowing how to build a Linux driver isn't incredibly helpful. So I took the knowledge I had and just started going.

I would try to visualize what I wanted in my head and then I would go find tutorials that could get me somewhat close, or at least close to a piece of what I needed. Then when I finished the tutorial I would tweak and change it until it fit my needs. The benefit of doing something like this is that you educate yourself and build your product at the same time.