I have found myself learning to code for about a year now. I spent the obligatory few months going through some freecodecamp courses and then moved onto some more specific ones like Laracasts etc but quickly found myself wanting to work on a project that had meaning or relevance to me.
Not only that, but I found it a struggle to relate some of the functions, components and other things I was learning to real world situation.
So I decided to break away from the tutorials recently and I am building an app to help my son's learn spelling alongside their schoolwork. Then I ran into my next problem!
Starting a new project without the use of a tutorial and the overwhelming sense of "what do I do?", "I haven't learnt anything?", "What's a function?", "Is array even a word?!". It is daunting, you have to push past it and quickly realise it is ok to not know everything!
So far since starting this app, I have set up a new Vue CLI project, started using NPM, integrated 0auth to allow users to login as I might want to share it with others in their classes, I have set up a new MySQL database with all the words, example phrases and definitions. I have googled what I needed, to find specific instructions and I am learning so much more than I have with tutorials.
The tutorials were great to understand terminology and basic stuff. however I found that just the trial and error basis of creating an app from scratch which will benefit me (or my kids) has been such a valuable experience.
But my advice, not that I am uniquely qualified in anyway to provide it, is to believe in yourself and give it a go. It's ok to research and Google, if you are waiting until you know everything to branch out on your own or go for that 1st job application, you might be waiting a while!
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