Four Strategies To Follow Before You’ve Written Your First Line Of Code

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It’s daunting to become a coder. There’s so much to learn and there appears to be a multitude of people who have been coding for years. Take heart, however, a full third of professional developers on Stack Overflow, which interviewed over 100 000 developers, only learnt to code within the past five years. Basically, it’s never too late to learn to code. But to help you prepare for your coding journey, here are some strategies to follow before you’ve even written your first line of code.

1. Operationalise Your Goals

This is an important initial step. Decide on your goals. Make them tangible and project-based. Hongkiat mentions these potential projects:

2. Decide Which Programming Language You Want to Learn First

Your goal should help you decide which programming language you want to learn first. However, you may choose first to decide on the programming language and then set a goal for yourself.

It’s probably a good idea to start with something simple like HTML or CSS. Both are used frequently in the developer world. This graph, showing the most commonly-used programming languages, comes from the 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Image Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology

HTML and CSS are widely used and supported by all browsers, and you can still do cool projects with them like formatting your blog post or email, or creating CSS animations.

You might also consider learning Python. Python is probably the most used programming language in Data Science, a growing and popular field. It’s also a relatively easy language to learn, because it reads similarly to English.

3. Install the Correct Programs

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Before you’ve written your first line of code, you need to install the right programs on your machine. There are a variety of options such as:

4. Find the Right Resources

There are many developer resources out there that programmers use when they get stuck. A good place to start is Stack Overflow, which attracts over 50 million developers on a monthly basis. You can ask your programming questions there, and you are almost guaranteed to have an avid user answer your question soon. Reddit Programming is also a good spot to bookmark and check out prior to writing your first line of code. You could also look at Experts Exchange, a paid site, and Quora, which is a Q&A sites on any topic. You will find that the developer and programming world has an incredible community of support through resources and forums like these.

In conclusion, once you’ve followed these four steps, you’ll be excellently positioned to start writing and learning coding. You may also want to consider enrolling for one of HyperionDev’s six-month Bootcamps in Web, Mobile or Software Development. You can try each of them out with a free trial.