In this article I want to share my top ideas of how to stay motivated when first starting out on your programming journey.
In 2019, I decided to make a huge career change and finally understand the world that I was so familiar with, yet did not know what was going on behind the hood: The internet. All my millennial life had been shaped by it, its programmers, the start ups and their products and I could not envision a world without the world wide web. Despite my appreciation for the geniuses that had made this happen, I had absolutely no idea of how the internet ACTUALLY worked. But my mind was set and I embarked on my mission to learn Javascript. The language of the web and conquer it.
There are numerous reasons for why people decide to learn how to program. Most people I have encountered are lured into the industry via the promises of a lucrative salary and the prestige that comes with it. Others, like myself, simply realize that programming is a super power, that enables us to not only automate mundane tasks and work, but actually understand the dynamics behind most of our digital world. Everybody would like to have a super power and a lucrative career and you can absolutely achieve that in the tech industry. But let us be honest, our human spirit is quite challenged when embarking on learning anything new and despite the best reason, we can get demotivated and frustrated. It is natural to feel down sometimes, yet for you to actually become really good, you have to stick through it, put your hours in and struggle through your bugs. Sorry! I wish there was a magic pill
So here are my top tips that I have used in order to deal with the frustrations.
Write down your own very personal list of reasons for why you want to learn how to code.
We all have a very personal reasons for why we want to learn something. This may include that you want to be able to support your family or spouse or that you are currently very unhappy with your job. Whatever reason this may be, write all your very personal reasons on a peace of paper and store it somewhere so whenever you feel like giving up you can read it to know EXACTLY why you started in the first place.
Find an online community that you can become a part of.
When I started to learn how to program I was literally the only female in my group of friends that had this desire. While my friends were super supportive, none of them could relate to my ever day struggles, npm packages or just forgetting commands. Now, OI know that not everything can be learned and most things can be looked up, yet in the beginning, I wanted to know everything. So if you have an online community on slack or discord, you can just share some of your thoughts as well as your first own project with a community that understands the amount of effort that you have piut into your work.
Start with your own project as soon as possible.
Have you also started using all kinds of mediums to support your learning? Are you also spending countless hours on Youtube to find other ways to internalize a certain concept ? Have you heard of tutorial hell? Well, that is the phase in which you follow online tutorials over and over again and hope and feel you have not learned anything. The best way to learn is get familiar with documentation. This is the official book, so to speak of the individual language or framework there is great documentation on everything on under the sun. So you can simply start learning via learning the documentation. This will give you a feeling of being in control and learning in your won pace on the official site which is super empowering. In addition, you learn to look up stuff on your own rather than being dependent on tutorials.
Prioritize health and happiness
We do not need to imitate the idea of the sleep deprived hacker, unable to smile because he has forgotten what facial expressions are. No, on the contrary, we need to look after our health and mental health so that we can develop a HEALTHY CODING HABITS and thus a long term happiness with our career and our life style. In the beginning I would spend hours and hours in front of the laptop. While these are great intentions, it is super important to stay healthy. These days I run three times a week and I go for walks when I feel that I cant find a bug and it frustrates me. I know of others who then do sit ups at Home. When I first learned the react framework, I would make pizza from scratch in the night. For some reason it helped me to relax and look forward to a meal. It would have been obviously much easier to buy a ready made pizza, push it into the oven and return to my computer. But it helped me to relax.
Make sure you get enough rest
Finally, the probably most obvious and yet so often forgotten. When I worked through a Udemy course of 50 hours video material, it was hard to turn off the laptop at night. The hours I had to go through never seemed to vanish and at some point the voice of the instructor turned into a monotonous melody in my ear. I was tired and restless but the last thing I wanted to do was sleep. This can happen to anyone. We are so invested in our end goal of becoming a developer that all life preserving activities seem to be secondary on the list. This will not help to retain any information in your brain and, just like myself, I had to go over the material multiple times.
Find your own cyber heroes
In the world of super heroes, the mentee always follows in the shoes a of someone else. This works in fitness and can certainly be applied to the world of programming. So here is what you can do: Find five amazing applications or websites and see what you really like about them, Write it down (yes, I do like writing)perhaps you love the animation on the homepage, the 3D effects on a website or the functionality of a specific application. So since this is your personal taste of what you love and thus, there is no right or wrong answer. Yaay! Now, that you know what you like, attempt to find out how the language you are currently learning has played a part in creating that website or that application. Then, you can go even further and see what frameworks are used or simply inspect the application.
