[cybard]

well yes I could just google it and there are tons of guides and books.
But I want to read your personal input, bc I really appreciate the tech savyness/expertise of our little community. How and why did you start, what's the best™ way to learn? What are typical mistakes I should avoid?
Inspire me (if you want )
Thanks in advance

[BinaryDigit]

Do it! It's a great way to express yourself, have fun, be creative, and watch things break, then fix. It's the best hobby to do so long as you have a text editor, internet, and browser. Everything is free and the barrier to entry is low. Start with a free page at Neocities, or any free hosting site, or edit a free blog (Bear blog, etc), and roll with it! The only mistake to avoid (that I've done too many times) is to announce a project before it's done "enough". But that's not a big deal anyway. Have fun with it most importantly!

[Nelbium]

Hi hi, programmer of 18 years here. I got my start at 14 in the schools computer lab. The person sitting next to me was typing something that looked kind interesting into notepad and so I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was building a website. Right then and there it clicked that I could just do that‽ So I asked him to show me a little bit of what he was doing, plus he showed me W3Schools. So when I got home I brought up the website and just started reading.

While that is definitely a way to learn. I don't think it is quite the best way these days. These days I would recommend either following video tutorials while taking notes. Just listening won't make it stick, and just parroting what they are doing in a code editor won't really help you learn much. After you watch the video, try to do what they did in the video without watching it, but looking at your notes. Rinse and repeat.

Like I said above, just parrot typing what is happening in the video as it is happening won't really make it stick. It is in one ear out the other type of thing, but doing the notes then after the video trying to replicate without the video and only relying on your notes will help a lot. Other things to avoid is DO NOT purchase hardware or classes at the start. Classes are super helpful, but there are an infinite number of free resources out there and it is better not to put a monetary investment in before you know you'll stick with it.

[bitzero]

I started coding when I was something like 15, simply because my first computer was a Commodore 64 and using it meant (a) just playing games in cartridges or (b) learning Basic to create your stuff. And this is what I did, starting what first has been an hobby and then, for a while, a job. Today, it's mostly for personal pet projects.

For me, the only way to learn programming was reading some books and practicing a lot. I still do this way. Yes, today there are soooo many video courses and other forms of micro-learning, but things learned this way simply do not "stick" in my mind. I need to read stuff, take notes, write test code. But your mileage, as they say, may vary.

My best advice: choose a language you like (to have real fun programming), learn some stuff (not everything, there's time for that) and put it immediately in practice with a real mini-project. Nothing complicated, mind you, but some code that does something you want/need/like. Just replicating course code, as Nelbium wrote, won't help that much. Then go on: learn other new stuff and play with it. And again, and again. Expand your knowledge.

And yes, before spending some money on courses, use all the free stuff you can find online. I don't know which language(s) you want to explore, but most have an official "textbook" you can read online for free. Also, share your projects, ideas, rants and raves. There's a community of tinkers here and out there.

[SynAck]

Like many others here, I got my start early, around age 11 or 12 with a Commodore Vic-20. I would program in the BASIC code to make it make sounds and such, and then once I was old enough to take computer courses in high school, I made basic animations and such. For me though, it wasn't so much about building things as having the understanding of how the things worked so that I would know what was happening inside the machine and the knowledge that I could fix/build software if I wanted to. I think discovering HTML and building my own web page and the Internet as a whole was what really solidified my desire to make software my job.

I would agree with others in this thread that just working through some course code or whatnot isn't particularly helpful, but when I was trying to learn Python last year, I found that getting one of those "crash course" books and typing out all the examples and doing the projects as I was reading along and learning the basics was helpful for me. It wasn't "power Python" by any means, but it gave me the basics to better understand and read other python code, and cemented some basic concepts that I could use when thinking about what projects I might want to build with it.

And for me, that's kind of the rub of software. If you have some projects or tools that you want to build already in mind, that's a good reason to pick a language and learn it; it can be a good way to express some of your own creativity and make something custom especially for you that works the way YOU want it to. But when it comes to doing it for a job, I have found that most corpo projects are uninteresting and shlocky, so then it just becomes all about the money and working on projects that someone else tells you to work on day in and day out. Finding good projects to work on that ALSO provide one with a living wage is a tall order these days.

So to me, the driving force is either curiosity about how things work (whether you end up building them yourself or not) or having the desire to build or contribute to something that will directly benefit you. Tangentially, if you like building things that will also help other people, that can be a good reason to get into it. Find a language that you like, that works for you, learn some basics, and then just spend some time learning a workflow in that language that works for you to satisfy your curiosity or builder desires. That's what I would say.

Also, knowing that I could build myself or others some replacement applications and host them myself when the techbro corpos go belly up and the bubble bursts is also a good feeling. It's a bit of techno-self reliance.

[5tern1]

I just did some coding in school and started my first projects at home while basically knowing nothing and searching everything online, but apparently that's what all the programmers do, so no need to worry.

I started with a text based rpg (that I'm the only person who ever played it because I lost motivation before there was anything cool) and then i did some sensors and leds in an Arduino setup.

Currently I started a website on Neocities (we did learn about websites from this big website companies in 7th grade, but not about coding) and its fun to learn both whats possible and whats important enough for me to put in on a website.

I'm still confused by anything "modern" and how it works, but I think I grasped the basics by now.

Have fun and try it out!

[0x17]

My first contact with writing code was probably on the C64, and later with BASIC on a Windows machine. After that, I've had occasional contact with code, mostly through simple tutorials, where I quickly lacked the necessary background knowledge and lost interest.

These days, I approach it all in a more structured way. When I want to learn a language, I look for various resources, starting with the absolute beginner level and working my way up, and then build my own small knowledge base for that language (Markdown together with the tool "ekphos" is currently my method). Every major language now has good online documentation (which is usually more up-to-date than books on the subject). Once the foundation is in place, I read, experiment, and note down everything I consider important, especially recurring elements like loops and the like. This way, it all gradually accumulates and becomes internalized.
I think the most important thing is to do it regularly. Every time I've been away from the topic for a while, I basically have to start all over again - but that could also be due to the way my brain works

[cybard]

thanks y'all for your input, it's always nice when experienced people tell their story, their way <3

[bitform]

I never quite got "started" but took a class that used Processing (so kinda java?)

I did terribly in that class and had near breakdowns at the idea of having to start any project on a timer, and just barely passed.

I do know how to read that format, though so it's not like it didn't help.
It helped whenever I wanted to look at examples of arduino code, and could understand what was happening and why it worked.

Is using the Linux command line considered "coding"?
knowing and understanding how to navigate the terminal through games like Hacknet, but also installing things through the terminal, and installing things through git helped me understand what I needed to do.

It feels like a steep hill of learning, but don't ever be afraid to be bad at it or fail, the important part is to understand why something doesn't work, and you'll always have a learning experience that will help you move forwards.

[mlatu]

guess we started when we got into comp-sci class in middleschool.. but we didnt really learn programming there, but solved puzzles using something like turtle pascal, but it was with a robothamster running in a maze..

later we did an apprenticeship at a school specifically for compsci, and learned C/C++, SQL and a bit of windows forms.

finally we went to university to study compsci, learned a bit of theory, but it was just too much for us, so we dropped out and did another apprenticeship, this time it was both at a school and in a company, here we learned another couple languages. after that we switched jobs twice and now are in the present.

to be quite frank: none of the learning we did in school or at jobs was fun.

we remember one time between our studies and apprenticeship2 when we tried to get into emacslisp. it was just to hard to wrap our head around the simple notion that ANY expression returns a value... it just wouldnt stick. we kept looking for the return keyword....

during our previous job we were a fullstack lone keyboarder type of girl for anyjob. it sucked majorly, but the upside was that we were basically head of IT for the whole company and could do stuff in whatever language we fancied at the moment. so we started picking up common lisp proper.. "practical common lisp" by peter seibel was an enormous help to finally GET it. also it is free as in free beer

and ever since, we looked at programming differently. it departed from this weird kinda magical thing we do that has to be done a certain way because the forefathers ritchie and kernighan said so and in our mind turned into something concrete like gardening.

we really like the way lisp changed our thinking, and we would love to relive the time when we were struggling with elisp, because today we cannot comprehend the trouble we had in wrapping our head around it..

we arent saying "learn lisp", allthough its a great language and everyone should... but if you know alot of pythonista, or luanista, or a bunch of C/C++/Javanista (apologies for putting you in one pot with the C-men and -women) start with that maybe, as those people will most likely be able to help you best... (if they got the time to do that)