So I made a promise to myself that I’ll really learn how to code this year. Looking back at my journals, I had been making this resolution for the past 2 years, but it all but fizzled out after some weeks. Last January, I tried going through the tutorials on W3 School, but lost steam after hand-coding two HTML sites. I signed up for a free online course on Python with a local university, but the lecturer was a conceited, disrespectful a**hole, and the course format boring beyond belief. After that, I stopped learning coding altogether for the rest of 2018.

I’m frustrated with the false starts.

So to make myself be more serious about this, I’m going to write about writing code here. Every week. That means I got to learn a bit everyday or every weekend, and write about my process, learnings, questions, and/or share the code I wrote here.

Why coding?

2018 was a year of making products and learning how to build, launch, market them. I managed to make 8 minimum viable products. But because of the mad rush each month to make and launch a product, I didn’t have bandwidth to learn coding. The timeline was simply too tight to learn how to code, get down to programming my product, debug, and launch. A common maker refrain is “Just use what you know”, so I went with using what I knew - Wordpress. While the learning from making a product a month was immense and enriching, I fell short on the goal to learn how to code. That was okay at first (not learning coding), because the novelty and fun from being able to finally make products more than made up for that shortfall. But after 8 products, I’m beginning to feel bored. Bored of using the same technology for every product. Bored of the constraints and limitations to the products I can make. It was hard to customize and create more complex, SaaS-type of products. A good example was my job board Public Design Jobs. After it became inefficient to manually scrape and input new jobs into the job board due to sheer volume, I struggled to find Wordpress plugins to automate the scraping and posting on the job board. 

Simply put, my product ambitions had outgrown the tech I know.

What’s next? Deciding what and how to learn. Go with plain vanilla HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL? Or go with tried and tested Ruby on Rails? Or try something new and shiny like MEAN?

? Day 27 of the #200wad challenge.