5 Months of Learning to Code

Total Days 137

Total Earned $2135

This year I committed to earning at least $10,000 learning how to code. I am now in the middle of my fifth month.

Last Tuesday I got accepted into Founders and Coders. A 16-week boot camp in London that takes people with little or no knowledge of coding and turns them into full stack webs developers.

The program starts in May, so that gives me another month to finish what’s on my plate and get ready for an intense four months of coding.

In November 2014 I knew absolutely nothing about coding. This post is a little road map of what I’ve been doing.

I started with Rob Percival’s “Complete Web Developer Course” on Udemy. I got the whole course for $25 on App Sumo, but it’s worth the standard $200. The App Sumo deal is sold out, but there is a link to the course at the bottom of this post. In retrospect, this was the perfect course for a complete beginner.

Once I finished the CSS and HTML section of Rob’s course I worked through DASH. A quick recap from a completely different perspective. I highly recommend doing this.

On finishing the Javascript section of Rob’s course, I started working through Codecademy’s Code Year and their new the Javascript Track. I am not a huge fan of Codecademy. I find their wording unnecessarily complicated at times. It is free though, and beggars can’t be choosers.

After Javascript, I wasted a month on trying to learn Ruby. Ruby is a whole new language, and I was still coming to terms with Javascript. I wish I didn’t do this. Having different types of syntax to remember is just a mess. Pick one language and stick to it till you have it down.

After abandoning Ruby, I started looking at Coding boot camps that I could apply to kick things up a gear. I applied to the Hacker School in new York, Iron Hack in Barcelona and Founders and Coders in London. The Hacker School politely declined my application. I managed to get into Ironhack but I couldn’t afford it since I didn’t make the cut for financial support. Founders and Coders gave me an offer on the condition that I got 100 points on Codewars. I spent the last two weeks on nothing but Codewars…and now I’m going to London.

Codewars is incredible, and I wish I got on it sooner.

I strongly recommend applying to boot camps if you are teaching yourself how to code. Even if you can’t afford it of the move would be impractical the process of consolidating your through and presenting what you have learned so far is incredibly helpful. Iron Hack and Founders and Coders have a list of prerequisites to complete. Using these as a mini curriculum was fantastic.

I learned how to use the chrome browser console log
I learned how to write code directly to the terminal.
I had to finish most of the tracks on Codecademy, except for the ruby ones.

Lastly, I started writing down syntax I need to learn so that I can memorise it every morning with Anki. Anki has been super helpful, and I should have been doing this from the very beginning.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Interestingly, none of the money I have made so far has not come from the skills I have been learning. Instead, I find website work on Freelancer and complete it using WordPress, strikingly and Imcreator. I’ll explain how I have been doing this over the next few posts.

Links to the resources mentioned:

Rob’s complete web developer course

Dash by General Assembly

Codecademy

CodeYear

My Freelancer profile

Ironhack Scroll halfway down the page for a mini form.

Founders and Coders curriculum)

Codewars