I almost quit my job until I learned from these mistakes.

Well, wanting to quit one's job is normal, but little did I know it was.

Probably I had less motivation or even worse when someone told me I’ll never be a developer, just something I wasn’t able to figure out as of then. Okay, what do I wanna share with you today? Well, I felt like sharing my story, maybe it could inspire you. This post is strongly for newbies to the dev world, however, anyone can still take something from it. So let’s dive in.

'Lil story about myself, when I started off I was confused about where to start. I guess it was because I changed careers. I studied architecture, in the polytechnic institute, which was way different from programming. But, I don’t want to go into that story right now.

Because I don’t want to bore you to death with my story and all that, I will just be talking about what my biggest mistakes were and why I made them, and also the solutions to getting out of it if you ever find yourself in such.

My mistakes.

• Not knowing where to start.
• Trying to learn too many things at the same time.
• Being in a rush.
• Not asking for help.
• Inability to identify what I wanted exactly.

Not knowing where to start.

When you are new to any skill, you feel overwhelmed, at least if not for everyone - it happened to me. I was confused about where to get started, I was lost in tutorial hell, lol.

Trying to learn so many things at the same time.

After I struggled with identifying where to start, I met someone who’s already into programming, so he gave me some clues and some technical advice. After I went online for some resources he recommends w3school and MDN, I saw how large all the aspects were. So, what did I do? I just dived in and someday It’s me learning HTML, not even mastering it a bit, other days CSS, then next javascript, at some point I got frustrated as I felt lost and got more confused each time I took those tutorials.

Do you know what that did to me? Wasted my time not coming out with any result, discouragement. And I started to think to myself - I will never be a developer? Yeah, I was making an effort, doing all the hard work, keeping late at night. But I realized I wasn’t doing it the right way - investing my time in the wrong areas. Learning what I shouldn’t be learning at a particular time. At a point, I was close to giving up.

Being in a rush.

Another mistake was being in a rush to finishing up every piece of resources I’m being recommended. Why? I will be honest with you, it was because I was thinking about how to take the smartest way out by making money from programming as fast as I can. But on the contrary, I realized programming isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. Another key take-out.

Not asking for help.

One big mistake you’d ever make as a new dev - or even those that have been in the dev world already - is not asking for help when you should. Some people easily feel intimidated or even feel inferior, and to me, none of those was left out. In fact, I’m a very shy person and I feel people will laugh at me when I ask for something they see to be simple.

Inability to identify what I wanted.

Well, this last one might have probably happened to some of you reading this or maybe you are going through that. It was really crazy when I started thinking of adding graphic design to the skill I was acquiring as of then. I wish I could explain this better though, but different things started coming up. They were quite interesting, but the big question was - do I really need them at that moment? Obviously, No.

So how did I got out of these?

First, I stopped everything I was doing. I started writing down what I wanted and how to achieve them, I came across an article that helped me to drew out my map and ensured I made follow-ups. I started with HTML using w3school as my guide to teaching myself. At the end of each tutorial, I review my progress. I had an app (clockify) that helped me keep track of goals I’ve accomplished. Everything started coming really well, I started seeing results, I moved to CSS and JavaScript. Oh, I’ve really talked too much. I hope you got the picture clearly on the screen of your imagination, anyway if you had read to this point I want to say, thank you for reading. But most importantly take necessary action to get you to achieving your goals.

Conclusion.

Use those few tips and few links I’ve suggested also to help yourself get to your goals in a shorter time rather than spending a longer time on things that don’t really matter. Please always avoid burnouts in your learning process, consistency brings good results, you don’t have to be in a rush. Ask for help when you get stuck, there are a lot of developers in the community that is willing to help, more also when you have a bug in your code, chances are that a lot of people have fallen into such errors before so the solutions are always available to help you get unstuck. Happy coding and I wish you the best in your learning journey. Cheers.