Where do I begin as a programmer?

Hello, I'm Muriithi Gakuru. I have been an active programmer running 2 years now. In that time I experienced almost all the frustrations that are there for beginners especially those who want to self-teach. This is my story...

Tutorials and courses

There is always that first thrill of successfully running your code. Not the traditional print 'Hello World' of course. The type that you do after following a couple of hours of a tutorial. At that moment you feel powerful.

I remember when I started out my journey, I went to a cyber cafe and downloaded tens of hours of tutorials from YouTube and some other free source because for the past one year I had gotten a sense that you don't really need the internet to be a programmer. I was wrong.

With time I found it hard to gather help on problems in between following the tutorials and coding along with the courses. In truth sometimes you need to tackle your problems alone in order to gain that stability, toughness and independence as a programmer and trust yourself to find solutions that come your way. As you follow a tutorial or a course, don't rush to find help just yet. Research your errors online. This way you'll find popular fixes for errors you might encounter later on in your subsequent projects.

Tutorials and courses are the most popular for programmers looking to find visual and step by step help. You might even be as lucky to experience it live and ask questions as the instructor codes. Some instructors love live programming as the audience helps to catch and correct errors before they are caught by an interpreter. This is a very good way to see the best practices of programming in action.

Documentation

As a beginner to programming, I would advise to learn to bear the un-styled web pages of documentation as soon as possible. Reading through these texts may save you a long period of researching about an error already outlined in the official documentation.

You might also find yourself still using features that have already been deprecated in the current package, language or software you may be using. Documentation is also a great source to find examples of what you may be trying to accomplish.

Tech Blogs

Tech blogs help a lot because they give a step by step coding tutorial and may as well be an alternative to video tutorial. Blogs help to view the steps in the way that a programmer working on a project would work as there are error corrections along the way.

If you can, start blogging about your journey of learning programming and write out your code. This may boost your memory and content retainment by a huge percentage.

Join Communities

According to Evans Data Corporation Data's Global Developer Population and Demographic Study, there are 26.9 million software developers worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to 27.7 million in 2023 and 28.7 million in 2024. That many developers in the world only proves it necessary to have support groups for developers and newbies in the society.

Developer communities are all around us and in different platforms such as Slack, Telegram, Discord, Stack Overflow and Online forums for individual programming languages and technologies. It just depends on what path you follow as a developer. Joining a community helps you to grow, get support for your development problems and also interact with people who are facing the same challenges as you are so join a community as soon as possible.

Get a mentor

Starting out you may have a general idea of what you'd like to accomplish. Find someone to guide you on what to consider and what to ignore in that path you have chosen. With all the content on the internet it is safe to say that not all of it is relevant hence it would just waste your time, the time that would have been spent perfecting industrially essential skills.

A mentor may help you find solutions with you when you are stuck and give you answers faster than forums may as a mentor is more often than not objective in their purpose with a mentee. Mentorship is also a good way to broaden your network in the developer community whether online or physical.

Lastly, it is also important to invest in yourself and in your dream. Only you can work on your goals. I hope that you succeed in your plans and I would love to hear your journey.