6
12 Comments

What is your routine to learning how to program?

I'm a Project Manager, but, I have basic skills in coding. Looking to broaden my skills and jump into learning JS & PHP.

  1. 9

    Build your own project. Something that stems from a real interest you have, solves a real problem you experience, or produces real value that you would find useful. Make it personal and make it ambitious. The sheer possibility of this creation should excite you. Use that energy.

    1. 2

      This. It's how I taught myself and built my first company.

  2. 3

    I am a developer and I would normally watch an online course (Udemy is my platform of choice) and then try to build my own project using what I've just learnt. In my opinion nothing teaches technology as much as working on own projects because you have to take care of everything from the ground.

  3. 2

    I agree with everyone who mentions watching courses. I'd add that having your own project/idea (no matter how simple!) and going through the process of of implementing it will help you solidify how all the pieces are put together and hopefully bring up contexts/problems/tools that you didn't get walked through in the courses.
    Do that ad nauseam. 😳

    Also ask questions. Find the edge where your mind crosses from exploring an issue to spinning wheels and reach out at that point. <--my weakness is blowing past this point.

  4. 1

    I first plan out using a spider diagram and then develop what's necessary and reiterate the process in the next few months.

  5. 1

    Hi Bree,

    Are you more driven by learning how to develop ? or do you have something specific in mind that you want to build? The reason I ask is because if you're coming at this from an entrepreunerial mindset, you're going to want the minimal amount of learning before you can get your idea off the ground (in which case I would recommend going straight into using frameworks like jQuery or React). If however you're interested in 'how' you build things in general, I would suggest start by getting a feel for creating web pages in their purest form i.e. start with HTML. Get familiar with HTML tags and attributes, (and learn how to build forms, not too hard). Next step would be using CSS to make all those standard (I.e. ugly) boxes look nice. After that, apply logic to them with JS (a ToDo list app is a great way to see all the different pieces playing nicely together). After that, the next step (but probably the most difficult will be to allow people to save their Todo lists by writing some backend code). The backend stuff is only difficult because everything else you can do in a browser (or using Codepen), but with the backend stuff you will most likely need to set up a server with a database).

    Essentially, I would start with the question what interests you more. If you're building a house just for yourself, then you only need to learn just enough knowledge to build your own house, but if you want to learn to build many houses and you want people to pay you money to build whatever house they want, I would suggest starting with the very basics of JS, CSS and HTML before you go near frameworks like React or JQuery, so you know what coding in its purest form looks and feels like. It will make the to concepts easier to grasp later on.

  6. 1

    Write about it. Share what you've learned. Start a journal. :)

  7. 1

    I would say, work on something you are interested in and use JS & PHP (I recommend Laravel) to get you there. You'll end up with a project you wanted t build and learned along the way.

  8. 1

    You should probably learn JS before PHP and make sure to have a foundation of HTML&CSS before diving to Javascript.

    The way I learn is usually take an online bootcamp course or read a crash course book and then build a small(~20-40 hours total) project which makes use of everything I learned in the course.

    So for learning Django I'd take a Django course and then maybe build a simple video-sharing type app

    For your case you could perhaps take a 'full stack course' with PHP as the backend and build a cool side-project that could aid you in your job as a project manager(Maybe a task organizer or product delivery/task tracker for your engineers?). I think building projects that could somehow help you make you not compromise on features and dive even deeper.

    Good luck

  9. 1

    Set a goal to make something. Try to make it. If you struggle and find yourself on stack overflow you are on the right path.

  10. 1

    Take a free courses on https://laracasts.com, which will get you a nice intro to Laravel. After that, you can decide for yourself if you would like to switch to a paid membership.

    https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-6-from-scratch

  11. 1

    I always found it best if I thought of a project and worked on that. Learned the fastest that way.

  12. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

  13. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 48 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 13 comments Use Your Product 13 comments