Developer jobs are one of the high-demanded as well as high-paid jobs in the market. It takes years to graduate from a university with a computer science degree. But in reality, many of you can have a developer career within a year as long as you dedicate yourself to learning programming until success. The reason that many beginners fail is mainly due to their giving up before they truly get started or in just a couple of months. Learning programming is not an overnight thing. It requires dedication, consistency, interest, and hard-working. Here are some tips to help you learn programming effectively and faster.
1. Clarify Your Goal
Knowing where you want to go is the first step to learning to code. Only with clarification about your goals can you move faster to reach them. Otherwise, you are easily stuck in your early stage — busy learning random stuff without any strength. It’s very easy to get lost as there are so many areas in programming that you can focus on, such as:
- Web Development
- Mobile Development
- Cross-Platform App Development
- Machine Learning
- Internet Security
- Cloud Computing
- Data Science
- Game Development
- ..
And for each area, there are also many sub-areas. Take web development for an example, there are:
- Web Front End Development
- Backend …
- Database Engineering
- DevOps
- Web Security
- Cloud service engineering
- .. So, if you don’t define your goal from the beginning, it’s hard for you to focus on any area. Narrow down your goal first, and you can always expand your knowledge or skills to other areas after you are already good at one area.
2. Learn to Ask for Help Early
Knowing when or who should you ask for help is a skill you will need throughout your programming career. Nobody knows everything. Don’t feel afraid or even ashamed to ask for help if you are stuck on a coding problem, especially when you are just starting out. But when to ask for help? Here is the flow you could follow these steps: first, take a break to clear your mind, and if still stuck, use Google to search for help. If all of these fail, then ask people for help. So, what people should you ask for help from? If coding at a Boot camp, ask your teacher or classmates. If coding on your own, ask online or some developer friends you know from some coding communities you are joining.
If you’re stuck on one problem, saying a code debugging, for many days without asking for any help, then it’s easy to feel exhausted and depressed to the extent that you might give up coding forever. So, asking for help early can help you move forward.
3. Put Your Knowledge Into Action
Reading books, taking some notes, and watching tutorials are not enough for you to become a faster programming learner. The best thing you need to do is to put what you learn into action. A simple explanation would be typing out the code, running it, and trying to understand what happens and why. Learn to play with code on your code text editor. The more actions you’re taking throughout learning, the more likely the knowledge will be stick with you.
4. Build Your Own Projects As Soon As Possible — Escaping Tutorial Hell
When you just start out learning to code, you probably heard about tutorial hell — watching tutorials, being able to follow along, but not being able to code on your own, and then going back to more tutorials to figure out. I ever saw some of the students lost in such a cycle during my coding boot camp period. Even worse, when they can easily copy the solutions from the tutorials to paste their own projects, they tend not to question the code or try to understand. If works, sweet. If not, go for another tutorial. They end up watching tons of tutorials before even starting coding their own projects. Many times, you will see many beginners are only busy watching tutorials without building anything on their own. The lack of confidence motivates them to keep staying inside the tutorial hell long enough that they don’t realize that they need to come out to take actionable steps toward their goal.
We need to switch from passive learning to active learning mode by building stuff. A project-based approach is the most productive approach to improve both your coding skills as well as your confidence as a programmer. Creating a project you want to build and figure out what knowledge you need to prepare and then learn from online resources within a limited time period, and quickly move on to your project. Even a better approach would be building your project during the learning process to fix your focus to avoid distractions from countless online resources.
Tip: If you find yourself struggling with stopping watching tutorials, I would suggest you escape for a while to allow yourself to take a break and grow a more sense of focus on learning and understanding the code itself.
5. Learn to Live With Imposter Syndrome
Do you have moments when you feel so scared of the idea of learning to code to shift your career? No worry. I had such a scary feeling before when I made up my decision to change my career four years ago. Making a change by jumping out of our comfortable zoom is a challenge to transform us to be better, or to come closer to our inner selves. As a fact of the matter, many developers including the senior ones live with imposter syndrome. We don’t need to get rid of it but stay aware of its existence. Instead of being scared by it, but treating it as a motive to grow yourself. Many times, you automatically gain confidence when you are at work with your focus. So, how to handle impostor syndrome as programming beginners? and even benefit from it? The key is to shift our focus to making real progress from worrying about our current status.
6. Apply for a Job As Soon As Possible
When Should You Apply for a Developer Job as a Self-Taught Programmer? Start looking for developer jobs after learning coding for more than three months. Don’t get panic if you don’t get the job after multiple attempts because you will definitely learn a lot from the process and the feedback from the interviewers. Getting to know where you are now and how far should you move toward your goal at a much earlier stage is always a good idea.
Conclusion
Learning to be a faster learner of programming can both increase your confidence and motivation to push yourself forward, and also exposes you to many more opportunities. Because you move fast, you tend to put tons of effective efforts into building projects which are essential to your portfolio. Nearly every new programmer struggles a bit when they start out, so don’t need to expect anything different from yourself. Just be mindful of the fact that struggling is part of learning new stuff. Applying these tips and learning to be a happy programmer.
