How I Learned writing Code

I was seventeen years old at that time, went to high school, played soccer, was addicted to mobile games and had never written a single line of code before. I lived a pretty normal life until the corona pandemic hit. After the pandemic hit, many things changed; schools were closed😃, there was the lockdown, social distancing and many others changes.

Due to the pandemic, I had too much free time and for the most part, my day would be spent indoors playing lots of games, being online on social media platforms and watching YouTube videos. I was totally oblivious of how much time I was wasting. A few weeks later I stumble on a YouTube video about game development; the video was specifically on how much money an indie game developer had made off of his mobile game. Intrigued by the figures I asked myself “Why don’t I learn how to make a game and earn some money?” and from that moment I started googling more on game development and watching more YouTube videos on the topic and found myself diving deeper and watching tutorials and eventually made my first ever game following a tutorial on YouTube.

Changing Routes

It was all fun and I had a great time making little games but there was one issue; I was using a cheap old laptop that wasn’t able to keep up with the process; the software(game engine) I was using for game development required a computer with higher specs than mine and often times my laptop would overheat, slow down, freeze(hang) and even take minutes to load the game engine. I started losing focus and decided to stop game development until I would get a better computer.

As I was watching YouTube videos on game development I also came across web development and was interested in it. So when I decided to stop learning game development I immediately started learning about web development. A few days after starting to learn web development I instantly fell in love with it. The Idea of writing code and seeing it come to life on your screen fascinated me and motivated me to keep on going.

In about a month I was able to learn HTML, CSS and some JavaScript and was able to create simple websites. I kept on improving my JavaScript skills and later moved onto front-end frameworks and picked up React.

After becoming comfortable with React I started to learn the backend. I began learning about node.js, express and databases such as PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Learning both the front-end and backend meant I could now put skills to work and build real solutions.

The Process

At this time I think I became addicted to programming because I would program pretty much every day. I remember one day waking up early in the morning at around 5 am to program and later in the day realizing that I’ve been programming for more than seven hours straight. I would sometimes even stay awake up to 3 am or 4 am coding. I fell in love with the process that even when I wasn’t programming I would be still be listening to or watching videos on it and this is when I started to notice how good I was becoming.

What I learned from my own journey

Learning to code and becoming a freelance web developer changed my life and taught me so much. Through it, I learnt the importance of time and that we can remove from our daily schedule the things that don’t add value to our lives and instead dedicate that time to learning new skills that that will pay off later.

I also learnt about perseverance, It wasn’t always easy learning to code; there would be days when I would be unmotivated to code, days when I would get stuck and feel like giving up, days where I would be burned out and with long hours in front of a screen also came eye problems but despite the challenges, I kept going and it eventually paid off. One thing that helped me to overcome those challenges and kept me going was having mini goals; daily and weekly goals on what I wanted to accomplish that day or week.

I also learnt about perseverance, It wasn’t always easy learning to code; there would be days when I would be unmotivated to code, days when I would get stuck and feel like giving up, days where I would be burned out and with long hours in front of a screen also came eye problems but despite the challenges, I kept going and it eventually paid off. One thing that helped me to overcome those challenges and kept me going was having mini goals; daily and weekly goals on what I wanted to accomplish that day or week.

It was an exciting journey and at the same time, a rough one and I am happy to be able to share it with you guys. Thanks for reading.