Coding Career

11/13/2023 · By Tony

The road to my coding skills I have right now, was very rough and hard. I learned coding from scratch (both figurtively and literally) since I was eight, with only a book's help. I didn't even know how to use Google! From there, coding was just a spare hobbit I didn't put much focus on. Until 2021, the pandemic hit hard, and all I could do all day was computer and books. I explored the internet, learned a lot of "computer" stuff and got an interest in making websites. My own websites! How exciting is that? I restarted coding and my parents bought me a book that helped me a lot.

Because of that book, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and even JS, and also because of the book, I got introduced to W3Schools, which is a really good site for beginners to learn coding basics. I explored web dev but was very confused at first. The main problem was, when I was exploring stuff, I came to a lot of errors and bugs that I had no idea how to solve. That's very normal, but I had no one to guide me and tell me what's the problem. I tried, but failed. On top of that, I was getting older and school had a lot of homeworks so I gave up on web dev.

Again, because of another book I bought, I restarted coding. Now this time the book was entirely about web development and it had pretty interesting examples and a main project to guide me through the learning process. It taught me all common HTML tags and CSS properties, and it also explained them really well. That book was AMAZING. Because of that book, I had a strong interest in coding, again, and this time, every time I went to the library or a bookstore, I would go straight to the coding section and take as many coding books about web dev as I can. The following year was just like that, I read a lot of books about coding, found lots of online resources, especially YouTube, where people slowly guide you through a project, step by step, and I was felling confident.

Just like that, through websites, YouTube, books, and my brain's help, I made some pretty awesome projects. I connected the pieces of knowledge I already had, and I tried and tried and tried. Until I know how a specific method works or until I learn how to fix the bug. It was hard, but you just gotta try. Keep trying and searching for resources and answers, and you will learn. I built a solid foundation in HTML and CSS, and slowly mastered JavaScript. Later, ChatGPT became a thing, and it helped EVERYTHING. It wasn't perfect, almost every suggestion it gave had errors, but I still learned. And of course, coding became my main part of every day life. A couple months later, I was the one who's teaching somebody else how to code!

When I started coding, I was just a kid who was copying things in a book his mom bought for him to the computer. But now, just a few years later, I made multiple web apps and websites! So what's one lesson I'd learn through my coding career? It was hard, definietly, and you will fail in the process. But never give up, and never be too lazy or afraid to try something new, because you will learn something from it. Try to get as much resources as possible (internet, AI, Google, YouTube...) to help you along the way. You look at other people's work, try to understand and learn from it, and then you think of a solution based on what you know and try it yourself. If it fails, try a new solution, then another, then another! Just try.