Do you know any coding programs I could do during the summer or during the year?? I applied to girls who code but was rejected, and I don't know of any others. Do you have any ideas on what I could do to learn coding and become good at it?
Hi Anon,
The key to answering this right is to figure out what you want to learn. There is no way to “learn code” - you learn different programming languages with which you can write code. There are a bunch of languages out there, and new ones coming out almost weekly. It can be overwhelming for even seasoned professionals. Your best hope is to learn how to learn programming languages, so that you can easily evolve as the technology evolves around you. It is really a way of thinking more than mastery of a single language.
Now, I am not going to rehash the list of places where you can learn code online. There is a master list out there somewhere. Maybe @thisgirlcodes can help me out by reblogging that, because I am 99% sure I have seen it on her blog. But there are TONS of options, if you are able to teach yourself.
My personal advice is just to pick something and start playing with it. First look at an HTML tutorial. This is something you can play with on basically every computer out there. So look at the tutorial and then start playing around. Open any text editor (well, not Word, but like Notepad) and write some simple code, like this
hi hi hi
Then save that file as an html file (like mytest.html), and then double click that file. It should open in a browser, and you just coded your first page. Look through more tutorials and figure out what other tags there are. Play with them, see how they behave. Break things. Seriously, you will never learn anything if you are afraid to break code. Break it a million times so you can figure out how to fix it.
Once you feel comfortable with HTML, go look at a tutorial on CSS. Style your HTML. See what the different options do. See how many different ways you can make the same page look. And see a lot of unexpected behaviors (“whoa, why did that happen?”) and try to see if you can figure out why it did.
Now it is time to add some interactivity to it, so this is when I would suggest starting to look into Javascript. Now, Javascript is a crazy complex language, and it can do all kinds of insane things. So start easy, try to work your way up, and see how much you can tame it.
And remember how I said there are a bunch of different languages? They all look, act, and feel different. Over time, you will develop preferences. You will hate some, and like others, and thats all ok. Just keep looking, and don’t give up because one seems weird, or hard to you.
As you may know, I am also running through a bunch of Node tutorials (for which I have now created a dedicated blog - @zcode), and so you can also work through those. The first one is actually walks you through installing Node (which is just a Javascript framework) and going through the basics of JS. You don’t need to know HTML or CSS to start here. You can try to just jump in. And ask questions when you get stuck. What you might think is a stupid question could be something a bunch of other people are stuck on and are too afraid to ask. So really, ask. I’m here to help.
I actually just got an ask like this maybe from the same anon and I was going to recommend @zwicking‘s Node tutorials cause I’m enjoying playing around with those right now.
Other than that I just reblogged a couple of things but I’ll link them here for convenience sake.
Programming Languages Online Tutorials
Guide to Online Bootcamps
17 Places Girls Can Learn To Code
Interactive Websites
Online Courses
So anon you have a bunch of options to go through and figure out what works best for you. I don’t think there’s really much else for me to add except have fun and good luck :D
Also if HTML/ CSS isn’t your thing, I strongly endorse Python as a first programming language.
I agree with @thisgirlcodes in studying Python. My first programming class was a Web class and I failed it miserably when it came to designing. I thought maybe computer science wasn’t for me and went to study business. It was alright but not for me. So I took a semester off to regain my confidence, and went back to studying computer science with a programming class in which we were using Python and I was #1 in the class full of boys! I got a program to work that nobody else could. I retook the Web class again and ended up failing again. I’m just not good with GUI. Even GUI in Python. Web programming isn’t for everybody, I don’t think.
So web development/programming is not just front end, and it is NOT design. Design is something completely different. Design is about coming up with comps and mockups about how something can look. I think of it as “coming up with the beautiful idea”. And someone else, typically a UI Engineer (a very specific subsection of web development), will make bring that to life via code.
Web programming is so much more than that. It is building applications that do stuff. Think of any website that you interact with - from Facebook, Tumblr, to your banking application. They have had a designer come up with how it should look, UI Engineers to make that design real, and then developers who created all of the functionality that the site provides. That is web development. Those are websites that do things. It takes a team to do it. You just need to find out which part you like and are good at.
I am not a designer. I have other people who come up with how a site should look. I am not a UI Engineer in that I understand how CSS works, but making things pretty is just not my strong suit. I leave that to people who are better at it. But I can built the crap out of something to make it highly functional. And the medium in which you interact with it happens to be the web.
So don’t write off all “web development” because you had one crappy professor who didn’t know the difference.
