When do you feel ready to start building your product?
I've been learning to code for the past 3 months now (putting in at least 3 hours per day). However I still feel nowhere near ready to start converting my ideas into code. I feel very paranoid that I might do something stupid in the initial stages that would be very hard to fix later on. I was wondering if this feeling goes away after getting more experience or is this something everyone struggles with?
There is no "being ready". Code is 100% learn-as-you-go. You will never just grind in the editor without ever looking something up. Start now, the best way to learn is to practice.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Hi yes exactly the same fear I had. So instead of focussing on big ideas, I started small to learn the process. Currently I am working on 2 projects, a newsletter about remote work and a curated collection of open startups.
I don't have to worry about messing up anything in the beginning as both are no more than a few pages and a simple database with 2-3 tables each. Once I feel ready to start my next big thing, I will probably jump into it.
Yes I think I'll do something similar for the next couple of months
You learn coding by working on some project. I usually write some code and then rewrite everything multiple time, always improving on it, till the project is finished. Also, your own understanding of the project is changing over time, so you need to adapt the code anyway. So don't be afraid of mistakes, but welcome them since you are learning this way :).
That feeling goes away because we all resign ourselves to stupid mistakes that are varying degrees of hard to fix later on. I mean worst case you end up throwing away all of your code and starting again just with the lessons learned - and that happens sometimes no matter how long you have been coding also.
To make things easier for yourself I propose the following - start coding with the express intention of throwing away every line of code you have written after a few weeks.