It’s never too late to learn programming. You don’t need a school, you can learn a lot by yourself. However, there are common mistakes that can make the task difficult.
I will highlight them in this article
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1. The tutorial hell
You would think that tutorials would help you improve. This is somewhat true, but if you only look at it, you won’t learn anything. This is a typical mistake among novice programmers. I also fell into this mistake at the very beginning. I just watched huge tutorials one after the other, I spent a lot of time with it and none of the things that the indian guy explained in the video worked. Even those who don’t know how to program can throw something together with a few Google searches. Sorry to make you sad now... you won’t learn anything by copying and pasting the codes in the tutorial. Most of the tutorials are about copy this and this will happen. No explanation for it. I can recommend that you watch a tutorial, analyze the code, try to see what it does. Then close the tutorial and try to do it yourself. If you encountered an error, solve it. Go to Google only if you have struggled for at least 2 hours and have not succeeded. You can learn by experimenting, not copy/pasting.
2. Shit code
By shit code I don’t mean code that doesn’t work at all. Shit code is the one that no one can adjust to and the whole thing is unreadable. After a while, even the creator of the code won’t understand it all. Here I can advise you to use descriptive names and comments in your code. Obviously, it is not necessary to write a 20-line novel for 2 lines of code, but it is worth noting in the form of a comment what arguments a function receives, what it does with them and what it returns. Here is an example of readable code:
var t = 6; //okay, but it is unsure what t means
var timeSpent = 6; //cool!3. No plan
Imagine that you decide to make an eBook reading app. You get into programming right away, but then you don’t know how to continue. The end of it all will be that this project also lands among the 20 terabyte of half-finished projects. I guess the feeling is familiar... Try to imagine how your application will work and what it will be able to do before you start. It is also worth designing the application’s UI in Figma. Always have a to-do list of what you will do next. I will write an artcle soon about how I build up an entire app from scratch (planning included)!
4. Imposter Syndrome
Many programmers make the mistake of comparing their knowledge to that of others. Unfortunately, many people do this outside of programming, which is a bad way of life. You don’t have to be afraid that every other colleague at your first job has already created their own social platform and you only created a hangman game. You only have to compete with one person: your past self. Always try to surpass yourself and not others. Some people learn new things in 2 seconds, while others take more time, it is completely okay. Believe me, in the end, that’s where we both ended. On top of the mountain of success!
5. Do not get overconfident
I don’t think this needs to be explained as much because it’s the exact opposite of imposter syndrome. You can never learn programming 100%, as new and newer technologies come out every year. Never overconfident yourself and be open to learning and trying new things!
6. No backups
Very important! Always save your work! Sometimes I made the mistake of happily writing my code for hours and then shutting down my entire laptop without saving. It was even worse when my machine suddenly died and I couldn’t reset a single code on my new laptop. Always save your code on GitHub or as a zip file in the cloud so that it will be there even after a nuclear flash.
7. Learning too many languages
We have reached the last point. I personally consider this extremely important, because I suffered a lot because of it. I was typically the guy who tried all programming languages, frameworks and technologies but couldn’t get deeply into any of them. The end result was that I had to re-learn many programming languages from the basics because I only skipped through them while learning in the past. Never make this mistake!
Conclusion
These mistakes prevented me from learning in the past, but now I have luckily managed to overcome them. I hope I can help you with this blog. I wish you a lot of patience and happy coding!
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