
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>
9. <div col-lg-12 col-md-12 col-sm-6 col-xs-6> is also going to solve all your responsive problems — she’s the real MVP.
10. Do not expect great things in 2 hours of work. You will probably optimise some text and add an image, let’s be real here…
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