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...

If you’re relatively new to programming:

• Choose a language and stick to it.

• Choose a text editor that is easy to learn and stick to it.

• Avoid large frameworks like Rails and Django until you’ve got a decent grasp on the language you’re using.

• Write lots of code. The specific code you write is less important than that you write lots of code.

• Don’t worry about choosing the “perfect” project. It’s easy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to project selection.

• Have your code reviewed regularly, ideally by someone who knows the language you’re working in well.

• Pair program, ideally with people who know the language you’re working in well.

• Develop a good mental model of your code.

• Become a systematic debugger.

• Write small programs from scratch.

• Give yourself progressively larger challenges. For example, write a project you think will take an hour, then an afternoon...

If I’m serious about learning to code I’m going to have to learn how to type a little faster.

I calculated my typing speed at 36 words per minute.
If I don’t look at the keyboard I’m hitting 7 words per minute.

I bought myself touch typing keyboard cover and started using Keyzen to learn how to touch type.

I would like to hit to 60 words per minute in one month.
I aim to practice 4-6 times a day for 15 minutes each time.

Will update progress on twitter. Please tweet me if you have any recommendation for good touch typing resources.

Stuff I’m using:

1. Typing speed test
   
2. Keyzen
   
3. Found Keyzen in 20 Hours. Great book on learning
   
4. Touch typing keyboard cover

Total Days 2

Total Earned $0.

I learnt that a “tag” is a bit of code that tell a browser what to do. For a tag to work you have to <open> it and then </close> it.

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1. If you want some text on a webpage you put it inside a <p>aragraph tag. Html doesn’t acknowledge line breaks so if you want a new paragraph you need to use a <br>eak tag. <br>eak tags can be self-closing when written as <br />. If you want a line instead of just a line break then use a <hr /> tag for a horizontal rule (like the short grey line above).
2. You can format text. Use the <strong> tag for bold, <em>phasis tag for italics, the <u>nderline tag or the <strike>through for strikethrough text. There are also 6 sizes of header text. <h1> is the largest and <h6> the smallest.
3. You can also create lists. <ol> for numbered lists and <ul> for bullet points. In between the open and close tags each list item starts...

Total Days 0
Total Earned $0

The guy who wrote the first course I’m taking Rob Percival wrote kindle single called How To Earn $10,000 While Learning To Code.

The book lays out a simple but practical roadmap to getting paid as you learn how to code. It almost sounds too good to be true so I took it on as a challenge.

(Read the post I wrote 596 days later)