5 Tips for Learning Coding

📌 Practice / Study everyday. Most likely you've never done anything quite like coding. A new language, logic, math, and thinking abstractly for the first time can be difficult. But if you work at it everyday, it will speed up the pattern recognization in your brain and eventually things will start to click.
📌 Mentally prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. Many people get discouraged when learning to code, and it makes sense; new concepts will repeatedly reset your "understanding" of how to code. Keep your emotional bank account in the green by expecting set backs and preparing for the long haul.
📌 Think in your free time. Cooking dinner, walking the dog, or just laying in bed are great opportunities to think about what you're learning. Put down Instagram and let your mind wonder. Much like revisiting a piece of writing the next day, spreading out your "think" time can give you a fresh perspective.
📌 Become bossy. Think of the computer as a really dumb robot that can't do anything unless you tell it EXACTLY what to do. You want the robot to pick up a glass, you have to tell it every step: lift it's arm, pivot at the elbow, close it's fingers. You don't want to repeat that everywhere, then code a function.
📌 Don't be afraid to Try. Trying to write a function but too paralyzed to start, then crawl forward by trying different concepts you've learned. "Maybe I'll define a variable, maybe an int. Didn't work, I'll change it to a bool. A bit farther now, let's try an if statement. Seems weird, I think it needs to be a while. What's the condition == or <. I'll try both and see what happens." After you've tried for a bit, take a step back and compare with your book/course to see if it makes sense.
💻 People respond differently when learning to code. For some people it just clicks and for others, the beginning is a grind. If you are struggling now, understand it gets way easier with time. It's not a question of if, but a question of when.
​🔥 The longest I've thought about a problem was 8 weeks. I thought about it in my free time. One day, something clicked and the answer became so clear (duh moment). I'll be telling my grandkids about that problem 💪

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