How I Started My Coding Journey 🚗
Tags: coding, learning, beginners, story
Published: 2024-05-28 10:18:16

Just 6 months ago, I didn't really know how to code, and coding was just this thing that only really smart people did. I wasn't even pursuing it. I thought it was cool, but not cool enough to learn it. I knew some basics of HTML and CSS… enough to break a Squarespace site that is. But, nothing that would make me *actually* dangerous. The word "JavaScript" sent me cowering.

In December of 2024, my life was turned on its head. In the course of one weekend, I lost a job that I loved with people that I cared about in one of the most painful and difficult experiences of my life AND I got engaged to my now fiancé AND I began the search for a new career. That weekend, and the following months were the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

While avoiding the lows at a Browns game with my brother. (*woof* *woof*). He said to me, "you should just do one of those coding boot camps." It was an offhand comment, but coming from him, a software developer for a Fortune 500 company, it meant a lot. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was something that I had wanted to learn for a long time, and this was my chance.

After realizing that many coding boot camps are prohibitively expensive and that the resources available online for free didn't offer any way to show my skills to potential employers, I was a little disheartened. I eventually found Codecademy's Full-Stack Developer Professional Certification course. And full transparency, I am at 50% completion of their robust and comprehensive course. (51% at the time of posting)

Paying around $250 for Codecademy (thanks, Mom), put enough skin in the game for me to motivate me to make progress through the course. I breezed through HTML and CSS and started finally pounding my head against the wall with JavaScript. I ate up the content and project for 3+ hours every day, the rest of my time dedicated to filling out job applications and checking my email for even one response. The lessons were informative and the projects inspired new ideas of things that I could now build on my own!

Now, the website you're reading this on … if you are on [stackfacts.dev](stackfacts.dev) that is … was custom coded using React, Redux, Node, Express and like 5 or 6 other technologies that I didn't even know existed 6 months ago. 

Am I an expert? Absolutely. Not. 

Do I know what I'm doing? Eh. I'm figuring it out.

But, if you've ever thought, "Man, I wish I knew how to code." Or you've been putting off your first course, let me give you this. Here is your permission–no–your encouragement to just pick it up and do it. You don't have to be super smart, you don't have to be technically gifted, you don't have to be a math whiz, and you don't have to spend a ton of money and a ton of time to start seeing the joy, inspiration, confusion, frustration, and wonder that comes with learning how so much of our world works. 

Let me take a break to tell you a very short story. I am a trombone player. I play in a couple local groups, mostly on a volunteer basis. But, there was a time that I seriously studied this. I have a Master's in trombone performance… (really helping me out now). Until recently, I maintained a small studio of high school trombone students that I taught weekly. I tried to pour out what I had learned on my journey and help them to become spectacular students. I did see a lot of improvement in their playing, but I consistently found my teaching come up short. So often, I overlooked small details or aspects of music or trombone-playing that came so naturally to me after 15 years of practice and study, I didn't think to teach it. A lot of it, I had forgotten how to even articulate!

Why am I telling you this? Because, if you're just starting to code, you're looking at a lot of resources that are incredibly intimidating and some that assume that you have lots of background knowledge. My goal with this blog is to create a resource that documents my journey as I learn to code and build projects. 

You'd be surprised at the things you can learn or change in 6 months. So start today, and learn as you code!