Stop reading. Start coding. Share your knowledge.
It felt like I never had the courage to start. I was constantly thinking that I’m not ready yet, that I have to continue reading and make sure that when I start coding, I would have enough knowledge that would make my first website impeccable. It stayed that way until I was approached by my very first client. I was just 19-years old. I knew I had enough knowledge to build a full-fledged website, but I was afraid about how the final result would come out. I finally made the decision. I had no idea if I would be able to achieve all the features requested by the client, since I had never built a website before. But I took the project, and challenged myself to do it — and I did.
I went outside my comfort zone, and I did what I thought is unachievable. It wasn’t perfect, but ever since that very first project, I felt like there was nothing that could stop me from moving ahead.
I want to give you some personal advice that I wish I had thought of in the early stages of my web development career. It’s not just to encourage you to get started, but to also show you what I believe could be a process cycle you could use to keep yourself motivated, and grow to become self-sustainable and start by making a brand of yourself on the web.
Stop reading
I was using lack of knowledge as an excuse to delay that initial effort to get started. Don’t be afraid to start coding and experiment with web technologies from the very beginning. This is how you actually start learning real code. If you stay away from coding because you are afraid that you will write bad code, then you are not alone. We cannot always stay in our comfort zone. To learn, you have to challenge yourself in areas that make you anxious and uncomfortable, and keep pushing yourself forward.
To make it easier for yourself, start by highlighting what you may think is important, and that may come useful later on. Keep these notes in a separate document or notebook. Another mistake I did was that I was afraid to mess up my books with pencil-notes and highlights. And for what reason? All my books are now shelved in my room, and who knows if they will ever see the light of day again. In fact, these books become obsolete after a while. Knowledge may seem hard to remember at first, but it becomes much easier as you continue progressing through your journey of web development. Write down the useful pieces of code, and archive the important highlights from your reads.
During the learning stages, you’ll find it very useful to have a summarized version of the books that you find most interesting. On many occasions, I ended up spending a lot of time searching for an important piece of information I had remembered reading from a particular book.
Reading, learning, and gaining new insights on something you are passionate about is exciting, but don’t let that feeling of excitement stop you from what is even more inspiring. Start by putting your knowledge into action.
Start coding
Practice — It’s time to put your knowledge and ideas into action. Again, don’t be afraid, although it might seem difficult to start, it’s also exciting to finally turn all that effort and time you had invested into learning, and start seeing actual results. Start to experiment with building the main structure or frame of a website (this can be your first portfolio webpage). Familiarize yourself with the language. Don’t think too much about its technical meaning at first, just know what it does when you use it. Technical knowledge will come by itself later on. You will realize that something you might have thought is impossible to achieve, will eventually come to your understanding through continual practicing, and actual development of websites.
If you don’t have any idea were to start, I suggest that you go ahead and start by building your own website. My personal recommendation would be to build a minimalistic portfolio page, and a blog page. It might seem impossible at first; How will I be able to create this design? Will my website break on one of the browsers? Is this semantic HTML? Am I following the right standards?
All of these questions can make you sceptical, and keep you from taking your first step. If you are at this stage, I would encourage you to go ahead and spend at least an hour experimenting with the knowledge you already have. You might think that practising just a little everyday is useless, but you may not realize you are already getting comfortable with how actually all web developers work today. Here’s how my daily work (as a front-end developer) goes in a few brief steps:
- I have an idea, a vision, or a design of what I want to build next.
- I start by writing the HTML structure, which consists of the elements that I think are required to achieve a particular result.
- Next comes the styling, I submit styles (CSS) to the element to try and recreate the same design layout, as is proposed or envisioned.
- I might fail on the first try, and continue adjusting the CSS styles. If the problem persists, I go to my best online helper: Google.
- I search the web for answers (and believe me, there’s nearly nothing that you can’t find about web development).
- I apply the findings and continue fiddling until I meet the expected result.
As you can see, no matter how much experience you have, the web development industry keeps growing everyday. New updates, features, and technologies are released on a daily basis. It does not matter how much experience you have today, the steps listed above will become a recurring event in your web development career. The basics will stay the same, and starting new projects will not feel as hefty as they were in the very beginning. But if you want to keep moving forward, you should not be afraid to start by messing around with code today.
Share your knowledge
I know what you might be thinking right now, “Share your knowledge? But I’m just getting started!”. Teaching is not just about writing articles, becoming a speaker in a conference, or writing a new book. Sharing your knowledge is also about helping others, and you will come to learn that helping has many advantages. No matter what skill level you have achieved (or you think you have achieved), if you got started and have already created your first website, you already know more about the subject. You started to have a glimpse in the real world of development. Friends, families, or people that are interested in what you do, are always happy to learn from what you have already achieved. You might even become an inspiration to others, and for me that is priceless.
By time you will also come to learn that by sharing your knowledge, you can start by building your own audience. But more importantly than building your own audience, teaching — or sharing your knowledge — makes you remember what is important from what you have learned, and it forces you to have an in-depth understanding of that subject. I find it very useful to look back into these subject specific teachings, and refresh my knowledge about that area.
Keep this in mind: Don’t be selfish. By sharing what you have learned, you are helping others and bringing them up to speed to a higher level of experience. “But what do I get in return?” Trust, and loyalty. The web development community is vast and spans entire continents. Making friends (not enemies), should be as important as much as you are passionate about becoming a web developer.
Closing thoughts
Repeat the process
When I say stop reading, I don’t mean that it’s bad practise. That’s meant for those of you who are still held back from getting started. All of the mentions above can be repeated in no particular order. I believe that by keeping in mind these simple steps, it can help you and others to move forward and keep you inspired and motivated.
Reading brings new insights on what’s coming next, and helps you understand new methodologies coming in the near future. Coding makes you more experienced and brings you closer to becoming an expert. Sharing your knowledge strengthens your skills, brings you closer to the community, and helps you to start making a presence on the Internet.
Do not be afraid of this process, this is just a method I found for myself that helped me (and others) stay up to date, to learn new coding techniques, and to start gathering my own audience (I will be talking more about the importance of having your own audience in future articles).
These are just some of my thoughts that are discussed in further detail in my eBook — Mastering Web Development
Thank you for reading!
Until next time,
P.S. Follow me here or join my newsletter if you want to keep learning the crucial secrets of web development.
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