Hello again, glad you came back for the second part of this journey. If you did not read the Part 1, my advice to you is, click on the link to get the beginning of the history: https://it4newbie.com/2023/01/03/be-ready-to-stiwch-gears-and-get-into-the-coding-world-part-1/.

Let’s move on for the next step, which I believe to be the crucial part of you transitioning period: LEARN.

II – LEARN

In the first part I comment about time being your best ally in order to learn. But learning is not a passive activity. Which means that you need spend energy, ATP if you will, to move forward on the path you want. For this, we need to be organized and most of all determinates. Otherwise, we are probably not going to anything because of the overwhelming feeling of not getting anywhere.

Step one, we are going to need to learn how to talk “coding” language, the “dev language”. For this our plan is stick around of people talking about this. Yes, I am asking you to be that person that talks about just one thing the whole time. That was I did. All my developers’ friends, I think they wanted me dead Whitin the first 3 minutes of conversation. Because all my questions, curiosity, doubts were about coding and developing. Other thing that helps: Twitch. Live streams make easier to make your questions and ask for advice. Really good community to start with. Then I highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePrimeagen?app=desktop, although his content most of the time is very advanced, our goal is to be immerged on the context and vocabulary of this area. He has the best energy so far.

Once you are getting familiar with “coding talk”, we should be moving other areas as well. So go for the certificates (Hacker Rank, Free Code Camp, Microsoft fundamentals). Let me spend some time on the last one. Microsoft fundamentals contains a series of certificates (data, IA, cloud) that you can take a test online and get more eyes on you. That said, I believe that all certificates should be used as a card to show how much you want this area, on what you are willing to do. To my experience, any boos like to hear this.

Last step, time to build something by your own. Pick anything you would love to do. It could be literally anything. The complexity of building the ideas is one of the best feelings, because now you are close to a professional development environment. You will see that now the thoughts need to be converted to code and this takes time. One of the most famous phases of coding is: There is no right or wrong, just different point of view. One problem could be solved by at least 3 different approaches, most of the time what really matter in the end is to have the code working.

There you go, three steps on how to learn coding so you can finally live the dream of making money by developing something funny and useful. I hope you are enjoying this journey with me. And stay tuned for the last chapter of this series where we are going to be approaching the crossing line: Get first job.

See you soon.