I started learning code after graduating from college with a Masters Degree in Marketing. I wanted to learn more technical skills in order to open new opportunities. I also felt like learning programming would help me make my entrepreneurial goals a reality. I came across Codecademy’s website and picked the full stack development leaning path, to make sure that I learn the skills and technologies that would be relevant to me.
My main goal was to understand how web applications actually work and learn how to build them myself. I surfed the web for most of my life without understanding its mechanisms and wanted to finally get behind the scenes. Combining theoretical learning with hands on exercises and quizzes kept me motivated as I was able to monitor my progress.
When learning code, you sometimes hit a wall and can’t find the right solution to the problem you are facing. What kept me motivated during those moments is that I knew I was learning something valuable and had to keep fighting to reach my goals. I could also reach out to the Codecamdemy community and seek some help.
I recommend Codecademy as a starting point to your learning journey because it is very beginner friendly and has a hands-on approach which makes it very fun to learn. Practicing your skills as much as possible is also very important. One of the most efficient ways to do so is to reverse engineer websites that you like, recreating some of their interfaces or functionalities. You can get a lot of insights using Chrome Dev Tools and inspecting specific web pages. I would also recommend getting involved in the Stack Overflow community, as it can be a very helpful ressource when learning code and facing challenges.
When I started to feel confident enough I wanted to get involved in real projects in order to take my skills to the next level. I reached out to a small start-up incubator in my city that needed a new website to collect applications and communicate about upcoming events. I offered my services for free and was able to build the site in 6 weeks. It was my first real life experience in coding and it helped me practice and learn even more.
After finishing Codecademy I worked as a freelance front-end developer for a few months, essentially to keep my learning curve steep, and was able to contribute to small projects. After that, I started working on an entrepreneurial project I had in mind since finishing college, and launched my own business [link in profile]. Learning code helped me a lot in starting this project as I was able to build my own online store with the highest standards and add all the functionalities I needed without having to hire a developer.
