Congratulations on the start of your journey!  FYI, this is hardly meant to be a professional class in learning how to code, and is more just one hacker's unconventional guide, especially in areas I wish I had taught myself sooner.

Who this is for:

  • People with an intense desire to build something
  • People who are too impatient or cheap to take a class
  • People with a laptop and time
  • People addicted to tinkering with things

Guiding principals to help you in your journey

1. Set a goal to build something.

The will to build something is a fantastic motivational force to keep you engaged and learning. Love movies? Build an app about movies! Want to help a local non-profit, with a cause you  believe in? Build a website for them!  Whatever you choose, set out to build something engaging for you.

2. Get ready for a life time of learning.

Prepare yourself, as there is no end to this training.  A career in coding is a career of life long learning.  Hopefully, that excites you!  Good news is that this is true for everyone from beginners to long time employed experts, and your potential for growth and learning will only be limited by your imagination.

3. Calm, you must stay. Hack away! <(°.°)> (Yoda emoji)

You will be surprised what you can achieve with patience, persistence, google, stackoverflow, trial & error, chillhop music, and some good coffee.  The knowledge is literally at your fingertips.  Your biggest obstacle is yourself.

4. Share your journey.

One of the best ways to learn is to teach.  Code out a blog (or try medium) and post tutorials along your way.  Get engaged with your local coding community (try meetups).  Take the #100DaysOfCode challenge on Twitter.

Getting Certified

There are many paid coding bootcamps, but here is an awesome free one:

Set aside some time to finish the many awesome certifications on freeCodeCamp.  The material here serves as essential core knowledge for coding in web based languages.  Our goal is to help supplement this knowledge and you put this to use on something practical, while building your portfolio.

Your resume is your github account

When you're ready, head over to github and setup an account.  Over the course of your journey, you will publish your code here.  Writing, maintaining, and explaining your code is the evidence of your technical knowledge.  You don't need a college degree to get a great job.  In fact, certifications or diplomas may do very little to help your cause.  Keeping a tidy and active github account is your best resume.

Not sure where to get started with github?  No worries, we'll go into much more details in the articles to come.

Get Visual Studio Code

VS Code is a very popular and free code editor.   It's very commonly used by hobbyists and in industry.  Head over to their website to download and install.

Subscribe on YouTube as we build out our app

Follow Along As We Publish New Lessons:

We're currently releasing new lessons mostly on a weekly basis.  Follow along here for what we've released, or subscribe for updates:

BTW, subscribe or comment if you find this useful!  Otherwise, I'll stop making these...

Ready to get started?

Head over to Part 1, where we'll provide an overview of the command line interface.