Here are some lessons learned along the way from my journey into coding:

Learning to code is not something you do on the side, this requires 100% of your attention

You can’t learn coding from reading or watching videos, you actually have to do it, understanding things passively is totally different from getting a machine to do what you want, which involves getting many small details right

You can get lost for days in endless searches to figure something out, and then all of a sudden everything falls into place over the course of 30 minutes

In the beginning, your code is fragile and you are hesitant to touch anything once it is working (but you don’t truly understand how), over time you get mor courage to perform drastic surgery as you are confident you can restore things to the way they were

Throughout the process your program UI needs to look “nice”, at least for me, staring at a horrible temporary user interface is not motivating. (I have the same with designing slide decks, I can’t stand ugly charts, even if they are drafts)

Coding an app involves a lot of challenges, if it starts to overwhelm you, pick one and completely nail it, even in a separate test app if necessary

I think it is OK to become lazy and “forget” how exact syntaxes work, there is always Google to fix that/remind you, as long as you understand the broader concepts

Google is a jungle: it has all the answers, but also many answers that are wrong, or highly dated, in which case the right answer might be lurking all the way down at the bottom of a page, written down by someone who does not really master English

The amount of computing power today is liberating compared to the 1990s, you don’t like how a browser renders a page? Just recalculate and render “by hand” at every mouse move and the user still does not notice.

Most importantly, when coding, everything is possible and can be solved!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash