One issue I came across when I was starting my journey as a programmer was that I didn’t make a plan of action. I didn’t clearly think through how I would go about accomplishing my goals and instead I was tunnel visioned. When you don’t create some sort of road map, you get lost along the way, and it’s hard to jump back into where you left off because you didn’t define what you were doing to begin with.
Research the language..
Assuming, you found what language interests you at this point, you should start thinking about what courses would help you grasp that language and increase your skill set as a growing developer in that area. For example, if I was learning html/css as my starting point into web design, I would start looking at JavaScript as the next step in my path. I would research general information on JavaScript as well as what implementing JavaScript into my websites could accomplish. This process should help you in multiple ways, but most importantly it will ease the anxiety that goes into picking up something unknown and potentially intimidating.
Lets take a look at our schedules..
Now that you have a general idea of what the first few steps will be (don’t worry the rest will become clear as you progress and learn more), it’s time to take a look at how much time you will invest each day or each week. This is the part where we stop being as theoretical and more hands on. The second you start your course, you will probably scan over how long the entire course will take or how long each section will take. Once, we have that information we can start building a plan of attack. For example, simply writing down, “I will finish 25% by the end of the week”. Can do wonders for staying motivated and having some accountability as you learn. It also will help you remove some anxiety, and help you rough tune your own ability. If you feel comfortable putting in more than 10 hours a week, great do that. If you feel more comfortable putting in 5 hours a week, that’s fine too.
Don’t feel discouraged, if you don’t hit a deadline..
When you give yourself a time constraint, and fall short don’t feel discouraged. The worst thing you can do is be overly critical, some concepts will take longer than others and that’s completely normal. For instance, I spent 6 1/2 hours yesterday trying to solve a programming challenge and ended up only progressing 2% in my course that day. However, don’t just look at the course progress bar to determine how well you’re progressing. The course completion total, doesn’t count how much time you are investing on your own trying to make those concepts stick. And you should be investing some extra time in practicing what you’re learning because at the end of the day, we want to take what we are being taught and apply it on our own. So when you miss a deadline, think critically about why it happened, set a new deadline, and don’t feel discouraged. You’re learning about yourself as much as you’re learning to program.
