c/coding-for-beginners

Apprecation post: helped at a code-a-thon and it saved my sanity

Spent Tuesday helping out at a local beginners coding event in Denver. I was stuck on a personal project for three weeks before that, tutoring kept me from going crazy. Anyone else find teaching frees up your own mental blocks?.

1 comments

aaronlee•1d ago

PSA: That "free" VS Code course on Udemy saved me weeks of frustration

I was super skeptical when my buddy told me about this free course for beginners on Udemy. I kept thinking it was gonna be another one of those boring tutorials that just shows you how to open a text editor. But after 3 days of spinning my wheels trying to figure out Git and HTML on my own, I gave it a shot. The dude explained things in plain English and even had real coding challenges after each section. I went from knowing nothing to building a simple personal site in like 2 weeks. The thing that convinced me was the way he broke down debugging like a normal person. Has anyone else found a free resource that actually worked way better than paid ones?

c/coding-for-beginners

Apprecation post: helped at a code-a-thon and it saved my sanity

PSA: That "free" VS Code course on Udemy saved me weeks of frustration

Tried that free Python course on YouTube and got stuck on loops for 2 hours

Swapped writing everything out longhand for VS Code snippets after losing an hour retyping the same CSS grid lines

Tried to run my first Python script and ended up deleting my desktop instead

Cut the crap on tutorial hell - how I stopped copying code after 7 months of YouTube

I finally switched from Notepad++ to VS Code for my Python homework

Heard a guy say "code doesn't lie" and it finally clicked for me

That one Wednesday where my code compiled on the first try

Tried using comments for every single line of code and it backfired hard

That time a library meetup in Portland changed how I learn coding

TIL coding bootcamps have a much lower graduation rate than I thought

My cousin told me to skip learning HTML and jump straight into JavaScript

TIL the rubber duck method actually fixed my bug after 3 hours of staring at code

Random comment at a library coding meetup stuck with me for weeks

Tried a simple for loop to update some user profiles, ended up crashing my database instead

Why does nobody talk about how hard it is to switch from Python to JavaScript?

Hot take: That bug I spent 4 hours on was a missing comma in a CSS file

Spent 6 hours tracking down a missing semicolon in Python

Heard a coworker say Python is too easy to be a real programming language

That one keyboard shortcut that saved me 2 hours of clicking

I was totally against using ChatGPT for debugging until it saved me 4 hours last night

Tried to deploy my first web app and it crashed in 3 minutes flat

Showerthought: That 'learn to code in 30 days' course I laughed at actually worked

Warning: my first Python loop tried to print my name 10,000 times