I'm going to be sharing five things with you that I wish I had known before I started coding. Now I see a few other bloggers who've written on this topic, and I wanted to put my own twist on things. So, in this article, the five things that I'm going to be sharing our things that you've never heard of before, except probably the first one you've probably heard the first one.
So, the first thing
that I wish I had known before I started coding and this is the one that you've
probably heard of before, but it's always good to hear it again is that;
There
is no age learn how to code.
If you're in middle
school right now reading this article and you want to start to learn how to
code great, that's a great time to start. If you just started college
(university) and you're worried that you've never coded in your life before and
can you start to learn how to code, don't worry that's a great time to start.
If you just graduated from college (university) and you never did code in
college (university) or before that, don't worry that's a great time to start. If
you just turned 30, that might be a bit too late at that point. No, if you just
turned 30, that's a great time to start. whatever age you are, it is a great
time to start to learn how to code. You don't need that much to start to learn
how to code, you just need a bit of passion and a bit of grit. The second thing
I wish I had known when I started to learn how to code has to do with what
operating system to pick.
what
operating system to pick.
I remember when I was starting my coding journey I was really stressed out because I kept reading these articles or hearing some people telling me If I don't go with Mac OS, I’m going to have a really hard time. Everything else is garbage next to Mac OS I am about to dispel the myth for you right now. If you're just starting out coding, there are three main operating systems that you can pick from.
There's
windows, there's Mac OS, and there's some variation of Linux. Let's go with run
two, for example. You can use whichever one you want. Whichever one is most
convenient to you, and it won't affect you that much. All three of them have a
small downside, which I'll go over right now, but overall it's not a big deal
for Windows, the downside is that most coding tutorials online are typically
done on Max or on Linux machines, so it's a bit harder to follow most
programming tools out there are typically really tailored for Mac OS or for
Linux, so it's a little bit harder to sometimes get things to work on windows,
so you might need just to have a little bit more patience and a little bit more
willingness to look around the web to figure out how to get things to work on
Windows.
That's it, with Linux,
the downside is going to be that Linux is a little bit sketchy in the sense
that if something goes wrong with your computer, like the computer as a whole,
you're kind of on your own to figure out how to make it work.
And then finally the
downside of Mac OS is that, mac is really complicated for beginners.
The
third thing I wish someone had told me about when I started coding was how
loosely the term API is used in the industry.
Like seriously, people use API for everything.
I think the best way to explain what an API is to beginner It's to say that an
API is basically the blueprint or the instructional manual that defines how you
interact with the thing.
So, for instance, if
you've got a front-end component for a button, literally a button that you put
on a website, and you can prop that button in a bunch of different places and
maybe you can specify the buttons color or the action that's going to happen
when someone clicks on the button that's the API of the button, the color that
you can specify in the action that you can specify for the button. Those two
things constitute the API for that button, or for that front end component.
If you've got a back-end
service like for instance, take Twitter that supports functionality to post
tweets to comment on tweets, to retweet tweets. All of these functionalities
are things that you can achieve by interacting with some sort of back-end
service in a specific way. For instance, for a tweet you probably have to hit
an endpoint and pass a specific type of data, like for instance 200 words or
200 characters or however long a tweet is. You can tell. I don't use Twitter
that much, and all of those things that define how you use these
functionalities or the API for the Twitter back-end service when you're cooking
something, and you've got a recipe that recipe Is sort of like the API.
But seriously, the term
API is used extremely loosely in the industry. Be ready for it
I
wish that when I was starting to learn how to code, someone had told me once
and for all that there is no difference between a software developer any
software engineer
Those two titles are the
same thing. I remember being genuinely confused about this when I was looking
into coding boot camps and some of them were saying that they were preparing
you for a developer role. Others were saying that you were going to be prepared
to be a software engineer and I was like is a software engineer more legit? than
a software developer, no.
But seriously, software developers’
software engineers the same thing where things get a little bit different is
when you start to specialize. For instance, if you say back-end engineer or
front-end engineer those are just Software engineers or software developers
that specialize in one part of the stack. And by the way, even their web
developer is basically a front-end engineer. Typically, these days. If you say
that you're a front engineer, that means that you are working on the front end,
and typically we're talking about the web here. Therefore, you are a web
developer.
I
wish someone had told me when I was starting to code is that there is no best
programming language to learn.
Seriously, I hear people
all the time talking about the best programming languages. Whatever programming
language you started with. If you like it, if you enjoy it. If you feel like
you're learning, it's really good. There is no best programming language. Apart
from I guess maybe JavaScript, JavaScript I guess would be the best programming
language because you know it's both on the front end the back end. It's really
versatile, so I guess aside from JavaScript there is no best programming
language, and I guess Python would come in as a close second because you know,
machine learning and data science, so I guess if you put aside JavaScript and
Python then there really is no best programming language.
Conclusion
And I guess peak that's going
to be it. For this article. I really hope that you enjoyed it. Let me know what
you thought about these five things in the Comments sections.