Hi friend, This is my first article and I would be sharing with you the steps I took during my early days and how I remained consistent and waxing strong daily.
Well I am a natural tech enthusiast, I love anything that circles around tech. I was introduced to programming by my cousin during my late years of high school, he told me about the amazing things I could accomplish by writing codes. This was an eye opener for me, as I was really thrilled by it, he encouraged me to learn python which happens to be my first programming language.
Searched about the language on the internet, looked for learning platforms and then I came across codecademy.com . Registered on the platform, started like everyone else with my first statement "Hello World!"
print("Hello World!")
Seeing this, I was thrilled with what I was able to do, continued learning got confused at some point, checked for the correct answers to the task given, tried to understand what was before me and I continued to progress forward.
One interesting thing happened to me and this has to do with the joy that filled my soul at that point in time, I couldn't resist the urge to tell my friends about what I had just discovered, to some of them I made no sense but to a few it was something they had no knowledge of but they were thrilled to hear me talk about it.
Went on forward with tasks given day in day out but I got discouraged because I wanted to do more than just printing statements, carrying out arithmetic computations and all of that, at the same time I wasn't understanding some concepts and skipping them in order to progress became a setback for me.
I had to return back to my mountain(cousin) just like moses, I tabled my challenges before him and he was always ready to assist me in whatever way he could, made some recommendations to me which I followed up on and since then I have been able to attack my challenges head on and if it's still looking like a wall of jericho, i table it before my cousin to help pull it down LOL.
With all of these what i am saying in essence is:
- Love What You are doing.
- Derive Pleasure doing it.
- Have a Mentor(someone you can meet to guide you and correct you when you are getting it wrong).
- Never let you challenges bring you down.
- Always try to search the internet if you're faced with any challenge, it is almost certain that someone somewhere has an answer or solution to it.
- Never skip steps or overlook some basic concept as they could later come back to hunt you.
- Always Take Notes (to make reference)
- Use social media platforms to your advantage(twitter for instance has got lots of developers who are active users, they share and put out useful contents)examples: YouTube, twitter ,facebook etc.
- Be consistent, don't rush, keep grasping at your pace.
- The best way to understand anything perfectly is by passing it on, so don't be scared to write about or share whatever you've learnt. By doing this you're helping yourself understand better and also passing it on to someone else.
Yeah I hope you got to learn a thing or two from my experience.