This advice helped me the most as a newbie
Tags: beginners, codenewbie, nextjs, react
Published: 2023-02-27 10:49:54

Hi there!

I'll be sharing my journey here. This will keep me accountable and focused and maybe help somebody else as well. I'll be building stuff for my own business. I have an online subscription-based education platform based in EU for teaching digital skills, like digital marketing, with several thousand users. Currently it's a WordPress website with various plugins and some custom PHP code built by myself (eg, I send user data each time their load a page to a webhook that stores it in a DB).

I've also automated a fair amount of my back-end business processes. I've been relying on Google Sheets + Zapier + Google Apps Script combos for the last 10 years to run various back-end processes, but now I'd love to step up the game.

I won't call myself a developer or an engineer, but I can consider myself an semi-advanced user of spreadsheet formulas and I understand the basic concepts of modern web development. I understand the core coding principles, know HTML, CSS, bit of vanilla JavaScript, PHP, how APIs work, SQL, relational databases, etc.

## My advice for <u>complete</u> newbies based on my experience so far


![Canva made image with a cute girl asking a question about should someone play with Google Sheets and Zapier while learning to code](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gfa28kz4zmt3orlrunc4.png)

I think playing with **spreadsheet formulas** in combination with Zapier is a great way to learn the fundamental principles of how software works. That's my first advice to anyone who has ZERO coding experience. Just by having 2 sheets as simple databases like **users** and a **log of their orders** can help you for example trigger an email when their total order exceeds X amount. You can learn so much by actually doing something that works quickly, albeit in a no-code, "toyish" manner.

<u>This will quickly teach you some key stuff:</u>

- **it's really powerful** and important to link databases somehow
- it's mostly **all about events** and what data you have on a certain event
- **it's useful** to log events in a database
- **functions get triggered** by some event (usually a change in data inside a "variable"), then take that data, transform it in all sorts of ways and output some other data
- **that can trigger** some other process of data manipulation, ie. functions
- "**if this, then that**" is really powerful
- various pieces of code can **easily exchange data** through API, ie. send data to each other via the internet

All of this can teach you what software is capable and I think that when you start learning more advanced tools and programming languages, the concepts stay the same, they just enable you to do more stuff, more quickly, more cheaply, more secure, more reliably, more user-friendly, for more users etc.

But every software needs to first and foremost serve a purpose and provide value to a user, business or organization. It's not about the tech, it's about what you enable with that tech.

Having said that, **I'm a nerd** and I truly love technology. I would do this even if it made me no money. It's magical and I also frequently use a technology to make something just because it would be fun to make it that way and play with it. 🙃

So along with learning JS or React, play with a spreadsheet, you'll quickly make something that has value.

## What am I going to be building?

Main main focus is the following:

1. **Replace all** Google Sheets + Zapier combos
2. **Move away** from WordPress and make a web app for online education
3. **Make a mobile app** for my students with some extra features like note taking, to-dos and a dashboard for their data

After that, I'll also be building a web app that can help anyone **create a powerful lead capture form**. More on that sometimes later.

## What technology I'll be using?

As far as the technology goes - I still haven't decided and am still learning, exploring and coding snippets of code to see what would be best.

Right now, I think I'll be building the online education web app with NextJS, but still need to learn more about databases etc.

I'll probably have an interim version of my business backend processes where I'll leverage Google Cloud Functions and their APIs for stuff like logging user activity in BigQuery etc.

## Conclusion

If you want to follow my journey, follow me here and ask any question you have in the comments bellow.

I hope to be as useful as possible to anyone on their own coding journey.

Take care!