If I Had To Start Over With Programming, This Is What I’d Do

I’ve been programming for about 7-8 years.

The earliest memory I have with coding was going through an HTML course on Codecademy and creating a bad portfolio website.

I knew since I was really young I wanted to learn how to code, mainly because the idea of building things from nothing was appealing.

That HTML course was sometime in 2017.

For the following 4 years while I was in high school I occasionally watched YouTube videos or Udemy courses about web development, making games with Unity, and a bunch of other random technologies.

I made very little progress during those years.

I didn’t truly understand how to code until I started my Computer Science degree and was forced to figure it out.

The #1 thing I wish I’d done differently was build projects in one domain at a time.

Because I could never figure out what I actually wanted to learn, I dabbled with dozens of different languages, never understanding any of them.

I eventually found myself working on web development for the most part, but even then the only coding I did was following along with a video.

I never had any projects of my own, so I didn’t truly learn the skill of how to learn programming.

While building Creator Kiwi i’ve learned faster than I ever have before because I’m constantly running into things I’ve never had to build before and need to research how to do it.

If you’re still focused on learning to code, by far the highest ROI thing you can do is build a project that sounds interesting.

Do it in a tech stack you’re already comfortable with or want to be.

The more experience you get with those set of technologies, the faster you get at building.

Forget everyone talking about the hottest new frameworks and just use what you enjoy.

That will help you build 10x faster than you ever have before.

20 Programming Tips I Wish I Was Told Earlier

I made a video giving my younger self 20 pieces of advice similar to this that I wish he could’ve heard as he took that first HTML course 8 years ago.

If you give it a watch, I hope you find it valuable

Have a great week.

Cole

P.S.

I’m thinking of building an open-source portfolio template based on my personal site.

It will let you write a blog, collect emails (w/ an optional Creator Kiwi integration ;)), take payments (with Polar) and have other niceties like a link-in-bio page.

If that sounds interesting, you can get notified when it’s released here.