Building Projects (best way to learn programming)
- The best wat to learn programming from scratch is picking you project so hard it scares you to think of it
- If the project doesn't scare you, it's probably not big enough
- Once you choose your desired project, you walk through 2 phases:
Phase 1: Project is hard --> Concept Based learning
- At this phase, the project feels unknown to you, you have little to no experience in doing anything like that.
- This phase depends on concepts rather than mistakes, which means this would be focused on taking notes and learning new stuff rather than reflecting on your mistakes and building better code
- This stage takes months to get past through
Step 1:
- Watch tutorials or courses
- These courses are concept specific to your desired project
Step 2:
- Apply what you learned
- You can apply these concepts in coding challenges or small projects
- Try to customize it and change it
Step 3:
- Write notes on what you just learned
- Do not write MDN Documents
Step 4:
- Evaluate your notes using mind maps
- After finishing a course or a lecture, try linking the concepts you learned by builiding a relationships between them
- Mind Maps are amazing for doing just that
Phase 2: Project is Easy --> Mistake Based Learning
- At this stage, you learned the required concepts, so the so called intimading project becomes manageable
- Here, you wouldn't learn new things, but we would just focus on your weakness
- This is where the real Learning Happens
Steps
- Break your project into tasks
- Find what tasks you struggle with
- Read through your notes and create a model answer
- If the model answer docent resemble the correct answer
- Then there is a major conceptual gap
- This is fixed by re going through tutorials and others
- After finishing
- Update your notes with
- Most useful code snippets
- Common Error messages and mistakes
- added concepts you learned
- How-to that are used commonly but easily forgotten
Why Learning To Code is Hard AF.
- In the concept based learning phase, you're just following what the instructor says, this is where coding feels like magic
- After finishing the concept-based learning phase, you'll have to build a project, this where the real world hits you
- At this phase you're confidence hits a new low, you'll start seeing how coding can be a pain in the ass when there is no mentor to hold your hands as you code
- If you manage to successfully walk through that phase (most people don't), Then you would've have successfully reached mastery. Congrats! 🎉
- Mastery doesn't mean you can stop learning.
- Learning Everything when it comes to programming is out of reach in the fast paced world we live in.
- So it's better to adapt yourself to an armature mindset, a mindset ready to learn and start all over again
- In this context, Mastery, simply means you are job-ready, able to pull of similar websites with ease
References
The Dip
Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard
