Lessons From a Coding Noob

Painful realisations you only make through experience.

 

1. 80% of the time you’ve probably just forgotten a full stop or a bracket.

 

2. If this fails, save yourself some mind-numbing hours scoping out full-stops and check that your file path/file name are correct.

 

3. Test. Again, and again, and again, and again…

You and Cmd-R are about to become very tight friends.

 

4. Sometimes you’re only going to ‘get it’ if someone explains and demos it.

 

5. Find yourself some developers and ask a shit tonne of questions. Alternatively — watch some videos.

 

6. Your editor won’t look colourful and exciting* until you’ve saved it as a .html file first.
* ‘exciting’ is a very generous term.

 

7. Forget everything you learnt from coding eDM’s.

 

8. Forget everything you learnt from coding eDM’s. <tr> and<td> are out. <div> is the new black and she’s kinda a bitch…Well, at least until you discover her achilles heel — Introducing:

 

<container>
<div row>
<div col-lg-12 col-md-12 col-sm-6 col-xs-6>
<p>A well behaved text block</p>
</div>
</div>
</container>

 

 

11. Give yourself a purpose and reason to practice. Find a friend, local business or charity that you can develop for. Hell, even do it for free! (*gasp!*)

 

 

Realise that what you’ve learn’t here can merely be considered markup languages.

 

Yes, I’m talking about html and css. If you want to be a coder… well Javascript awaits you my friends!

 

Happy coding!

 

This article was originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@katefrappell/lessons-from-a-coding-noob-88539918b3bc