Top 5 Lesson I Learned on My Coding Journey

Learning how to code is hard, but learning to code by yourself is even harder. The programming world is a very opinionated field and everybody has a different story to share. I also do have lessons to share. In this article, I give the top 5 lessons I learned while learning how to code in my earlier days. Coding is fun!!! enjoy.

1 - CONSISTENCY IS KEY

Consistency can be said to be the quality or fact of staying the same at different times. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defined being consistent as " always behaving or positively happening similar esp.." It also says that " the occasional mistake doesn't matter but if you get it consistently wrong you're in trouble." on the contrary, I have learned that to become good at coding you have to always do it no matter the situation. Do not worry about errors because they are bound to happen. Even the best in the field talks about how important errors are. I listened to a podcast/article in which one developer said if you start a project from start to finish without getting an error then there must be something wrong because it's very strange not to get errors while coding. Whether Syntax errors, runtime errors or any type of error. So the takeaway here is that being consistent has been very helpful for me on my journey. When I started I was struggling to position elements with CSS flexbox but I kept working on it over and over now I'm not saying I'm a master but I can position elements wherever I want them.

2 - THE ROAD IS MUDDY

When I started coding I watched a lot of YouTube videos telling me it was easy. I thought it was just like going on a road trip on an asphalt road. But in truth and all honesty for me, it was a red muddy road. Just imagine or cast your mind back to that time it was raining and you were in the village or on an untarred road just how sticky and muddy it gets. You even get stuck somewhere and are short of ideas. That's exactly what I experienced, there was a time when I asked myself whether becoming a developer was the way to go. At this point, I was frustrated that things were not working as planned and so I stopped for a while and then listened to podcasts and read articles like this for some motivation and inspiration and I came back again. So it's not going to be an easy ride.

3 - LEARN LIKE A RETAILER

If you're running some sort of business or ever studied business or did something relating to business, you will probably no who a retailer is. So for those who don't know who a retailer is:- A retailer is a person or business that sells goods to the public in relatively small quantities for use or consumption rather than for resale. So this means selling in small chunks. So when you're learning to program you need to learn bit by bit, don't just watch a 10- hour course on YouTube in a day and think you can build anything you dream of. With this learning you do it a step at a time, make sure you understand how to print "hello world" before you go about learning variables. Because if you can't print to the console you obviously cannot learn how to create variables because you'll be printing variables too to the console. So be a retail learner but instead of selling you're learning in small bits.

4 - ARTICLES ARE THE HIDDEN GEMS

A gem means something which is extremely outstanding and not many people may know about. In programming or coding, a lot of people don't fancy reading articles because they think they don't have time or it's too long to read. But one thing I know for sure is that they're one of the weapons you need in your arsenal as a programmer. Some of these articles contain solutions to problems you face every day, others give you ideas on projects to build, others give recommendations as to the best practices and others inform you about important trends. So articles are just as important as docs.

5 - IT'S A NEVER-ENDING JOURNEY

I have realized that becoming a programmer requires one to be a lifelong learner. That is, you need to be learning all the time because the field is very dynamic new technologies are evolving day in and day out. The tech world is like a moving train without breaks, it continues moving forward and in other to still be on that train, you need to always be aware of changes in the industry and new things arriving. So being a lifelong learner will ensure you have a lifetime ticket that does not expire, so you can be on the train for as long as you live.