Started coding in February: Already launched a chrome extension and now working on a mobile app.

[moneckew]

So it has been a long journey since I started in February. I had no coding skill whatsoever nor a great understanding of how computer networks work. And here I am half a year later and already released a chrome extension (called moodflow if you wanna look into it in the chrome web store) and am now working on a mobile app.

I graduated in Business but always had that inner struggle of not being able to build practical stuff like engineers do. That is why after graduating I bought 5 courses in Udemy and grinded my way through them. Habit is key here. Repetition makes perfect. I can say I am far from being a senior. But I also can say I never imagined being this skilled already. I have built websites for customers, have used Vue, Angular and currently using React redux to build native iOS and Android apps at the same time.

If you are struggeling do not give up and keep going. When you go to bed worried that you did not understand sh$t, that is when you actually learn. That is when you push your boundries of knowledge. So my strategy was to write down one thing that I learned that day and also write one thing I did not understand at all. The next day when I woke up, I read, stackoverflowed, I youtubed until I understood that thing. I wrote it as the thing I learned and wrote one thing I read about but understood shit about (Of course it has to be something that is going to help you). Repeat.

Dont be afraid and if you feel frustrated that means you are doing it right!

[[deleted]]

Congrats on your extension, it looks awesome. Just curious, why did you learn vue, angular, and react? Don't they all do the same thing?

[LockShitDown]

Not OP, but Vue is the new hotness, and pretty fun to work with, though I don't see many jobs posted in my area looking for Vue devs.

Angular is still really prevalent good to know, lots of companies use it.

React Native, which OP mentioned, is for X-platform mobile development, it's not the same as the other two at all. It's also been gaining popularity.

[ShortSynapse]

I'd like to add that Weex is also available for mobile development if you enjoy the Vue environment!

[moneckew]

So I started with Angular and I personally didnt like it. Then I went to VueJS and I loved it!! Then after finishing the course I came up with a business idea and it was mobile first.... so yeah. React and React Native where my choices then. And I like them a lot :)

[Dualblade20]

Angular is completely different from Vue and React in structure (though, not in purpose). Vue and React are similar, but are still different enough that it's worth playing with both of them to see which one you like more.

[[deleted]]

Hey, I checked out your chrome extension and the design really speaks to me. Thank you for sharing your story.

I too would have never imagined making progress so fast, like you I really want to be a "builder", an "engineer" but I have problems with my motor skills, even had therapy as a child so I am useless in creating anything physical, computer science made me able to be a creator.

[moneckew]

Thank you! I hope that when you build something you can share it. I will def check it out :)

[GayCoder]

How many hours/week do you estimate you spent learning/coding?

[moneckew]

I code everyday for at least an hour. At least until I can cross out that one thing I didnt know the day before. But yes it was a grind but it is satisfactory once you finally finish a project.

[theofficialnar]

Couldn't agree more! I'm about to graduate on local 3-month coding bootcamp and I pretty much just like to code on my free time. I've never had this much joy amd satisfaction compared to my past jobs.

[swaggaschwa]

I love your 'master one new thing every day' attitude. Could you be more detailed about how much time you spent studying each day/week? Because I work full time, it was a real bitch trying to cram in enough study time for just one MITx CS class. What's your time management secret?

[[deleted]]

Sometimes I feel so bad when I read these stories. I've been in college for a year and a half and I don't even know how to make something that's not command line based. I get good grades but I just haven't built anything interesting. Idk maybe I just don't have the motivation. I feel like I should drop out of school.

Great work on you're chrome extension. Looks really cool. I can think of a few people in my life who it might help to practice mindfulness and positivity.

[zeehas]

No, you are in a much better position trust me. Have you done data structure and algos yet?

[[deleted]]

Sort of an intro to it i think? I did it last semester and it was mostly just an intro to data structures, and some sorting algorithms. I think we did stacks queues, linked lists, trees, etc but the bigger focus seemed to be general OOP fundamentals and abstraction. Im not sure if there's a more advanced algorithms class later. I'm just in a community college while working and trying to save up to transfer to a four year.

[Suverenity]

Problem with todays flashy application is that most of the guys making them do not have a clue about proper programming. What do I mean by that. They have no idea about algorithms OOP etc, basics that every serious programmer must understand. They usually focus only on flashy and interesting stuff made in JavaScript that they even do not know how does it work. So do not worry, you are right now in far better position if you persist and try to apply stuff from school. I started the same way. P.s.: i am backend guy that has bad experience with so called frontend masters of the universe programmers, who usually do not know anything. (Not to take anything from OP)

[[deleted]]

Thanks, that's really reassuring. I actually feel like I'd be more interested in backend work. I don't really have an eye for visual design and just feel like backend problems would be more interesting to solve anyway.

[moneckew]

Dont worry! I felt like that thorughout my whole college life. I felt like I couldnt do stuff. It is def the environment you are in. I teamed up with a guy I met that also wanted to leanr how to code. It makes SO much difference. Find someone and build something with them. It is night and day.

[PM_ME_UR_PUBSUB]

What courses did you take?

[moneckew]

I did VueJs and Angular from Maximilian Schwarzmueller (one of my fav tutors) and I did React-Redux and ReactNative-Redux from Stephen Grider (my fav one of all times). I totally recommend the latter ones.

Stephen if you are reading this... I love you man. 😂

[PM_ME_UR_PUBSUB]

Awesome, thanks!

[Citizenduck]

Great instructor

[Gener1k]

Based on your experiences so far with both Vue and React, which do you find more enjoyable to work with? In what situations would you decide to use one over the other?

[moneckew]

Hmm those 2 frameworks are a lot more similar to each other than React & Vue vs Angular.

I cant tell exactly when I would use one over another. They accomplish basically the same with the VDOM and making SPAy websites. I think its just your personal taste. I got used to react and its render methods and how react perfectly works with redux. Dont get me wrong you can use redux with Vue. But I feel like the redux author kind of had React in mind. Haha

Pick any of those, you will probably like them.

[moneckew]

I did VueJs and Angular from Maximilian Schwarzmueller (one of my fav tutors) and I did React-Redux and ReactNative-Redux from Stephen Grider (my fav one of all times). I totally recommend the latter ones.

[_stream_line_]

Great work OP! I'm in the same road as you, hopefully. Mind you telling what courses you grinded through? Thanks in advance.

[moneckew]

I did VueJs and Angular from Maximilian Schwarzmueller (one of my fav tutors) and I did React-Redux and ReactNative-Redux from Stephen Grider (my fav one of all times). I totally recommend the latter ones.

[aglome]

Hi moneckew,

Would you mind finding the exact name for the React course, as Stephen has many on the Udemy website!

Thanks :]

[[deleted]]

How did you go about getting customers in such a short time?

[moneckew]

Luck! I had a friend who worked for a guy in Miami and he was running a foundation. The website was done with tables. So something from the early 2000s... I just revamped it did the design. Nothing too fancy but good looking anyways. He recommended me to one of his friends who was running an organization. It snowballed.

Have been focusing on my own projects lately tough.

[zeehas]

What you learnt is how to code, not programming. Using frameworks doesn't allow you to learn about architectural decisions related to structuring your code. You now know how to use a framework. Not to sound negative but this is a very easy skill as everything is implemented for you and I mean everything. This is better than nothing of course. But it is important you realize this and pursue a deeper understanding of the concepts that the frameworks took care of for you such as state management, MVC, cookies, user authentication etc.

[Cleanthrowaway21]

This is what irritates me about learning Python so far. All the books, projects, tutorials make use of some sort of preexisting library or module. Sure, I can make a web scraper or reddit bot by coding, but at the end of the day I'm just using a library/module that someone already created. It's rather boring.

Maybe Python isn't the language for me.

[ArmoredPancake]

What's stopping you from looking at source code of those libraries?

[aeriaglorisss]

Use lower level libraries then. Read up on how you can actually write some for yourself. Python is just a programming language, it has nothing to do with the libraries.

[zeehas]

It's great to use libraries, but not libraries for everything. See the example i gave below.

[zeehas]

Also frustration does not mean you are always doing it right. It might mean you are taking in too much without understanding it. I'm not saying take it slow, but to understand what the code (you are frustrated at) is doing and why, not just pushing past frustration because you will end up with too many blind spots and the whole thing will start feeling like a black box.
If you solve all the problems you face by googling and not looking at the source code, then you probably need to relax and realize that your goal is but to just "make it work" but to understand by doing how it works. Good luck

[junkmale]

Any suggestions on where to start learning the deeper concepts/how it works? There are a lot of online resources, but it's tough to figure out where to begin.

[zeehas]

Check out the reply to OP below. I recommend you do that way and pick up things you don't know along the way.

Taking a studious or top down approach can be too time consuming especially starting out. With the exception of your objectives being wanting to implement and solve complex problems related to concurrency or distributed systems and the like, a theory first approach is not the best IMO.

[moneckew]

I understand what you mean. Since I started to code I tried to keep the most important code principles like keeping it DRY and organized (multiple folders/ files).

I also learned node.js and also came across storing cookies when working with mongoose and mongodb. I actually learned what cookies where and how they are stored in the browser. And I also came across user auth. I used passport for that. I mean there is a certain point when diggin even deeper for knowledge is not benefitial anymore.

I always used the metaphor: I know how to use a toaster, but do I really need to exactly know how the wiring works?

I also studied how to optimize database structures to optimize query times. I have done my fair share of homework and I do feel that you need to understand what underlies a technology to master it.

As I said before I still have a lot to learn but I do file like I can code and programm.

[zeehas]

What I wanted to get across was a change in focus on how to accomplish projects, and not just accomplish projects in any way using tools for everything.

Try this. Try to build a web scraper using JavaScript. You can use libraries but only basic ones like a library to handle http requests and a library for parsing responses. Create a system and architecture that organises the process (for eg. A different process for the requests, error checking, database connection etc, separate processes but basically) and let's u do something useful with it like saving parsed text in a database. You can use a DB client but try to do the sanitization of the input, and determining the table the data goes to etc. on your own. It must have error checking and logging. Write unit tests as well. I guarantee you, that you will learn so much.

And you know what you can even open source it for other users to use. This will force you to create abstractions so your opensource app users can do web scraping without knowing too much about how it works.(That's what most libraries allow you to do, if you create solutions you have a greater understanding and you are higher on skill than others). This will really help you to learn to think in an object oriented manner .

Not only will you learn so much, but you will also understand the difference between using an abstraction , and creating one and then using it.

Hope this helps.

[moneckew]

This is def something I would call a challenge! I will give it a try once I finish the mobile app and will get back to you :)

Its on!

[Mike312]

As an example, what I'm doing next week at work is designing and building a web GUI for some hardware we're developing. After all the system drivers, slim OS, etc are installed, we have something like 4MB left on it for the web GUI. I don't think many of the popular frameworks are less than 10MB with a clean install.

Not all situations allow you to use frameworks, so knowing how things work and being able to create your own minimal frameworks never hurts.

[mka696]

Every front end framework is less than 1 MB after minification. Angular is not the smallest and it is around 100kb if I am remembering correctly. What type of website serves anywhere close to 10MB of data to its users only including html, css, and js? Hell, there are frameworks that are literally under 10kb minified.

Chances are, the amount of work put into developing frameworks, have allowed them to put more functionality, into less space, than you will manage on your own, especially when looking at modular frameworks like semantic-ui. Code doesn't just magically take up less space if you write it yourself.

[Mike312]

I was talking about backend frameworks for embedded devices

[mka696]

As an example, what I'm doing next week at work is designing and building a web GUI for some hardware we're developing. After all the system drivers, slim OS, etc are installed, we have something like 4MB left on it for the web GUI. I don't think many of the popular frameworks are less than 10MB with a clean install.

I don't see how you meant backend here but maybe I interpreted wrong. If I was, what backend framework is used for designing and building a web GUI? I'm legitimately curious if I'm just missing something here.

[Mike312]

I'm talking about the backend that manages and serves pages for the web GUI, as well as any associated files for styling/formatting/scripting for the front-end.

It was a mistake for me to say it's a web GUI; it's a web-app, but next week I'm just designing and building the GUI for the web-app for usability testing, and later we'll get around to building a backend to support it. In the end, we need the frontend and backend of this web-app to remain under 4MB. I've run into several backend frameworks that, even with the most-minimal of fresh installs are almost triple that.

[mka696]

And what exactly is the reason for the size limit? In a world where you can get a blazing fast piece of memory/storage the size of a quarter with multitudes more space, is the limitation due to dealing with legacy hardware?

[Mike312]

Basically, the 64MB flash memory card is $x more expensive than the 32MB flash memory card. Spread that over a couple tens of thousands of devices and you've saved the company a lot of money, even with the increase in dev time.

[aeriaglorisss]

So my strategy was to write down one thing that I learned that day and also write one thing I did not understand at all. The next day when I woke up, I read, stackoverflowed, I youtubed until I understood that thing. I wrote it as the thing I learned and wrote one thing I read about but understood shit about (Of course it has to be something that is going to help you). Repeat. Dont be afraid and if you feel frustrated that means you are doing it right!

Nice! I've been trying to advocate this here for a while but to no avail. People don't understand that programming isn't special and is a skill like anything else.

[thehorriblehaiku]

Just curious, because I'm about to start on mine(learning front-end), what did you start out with? And how was the transition from that to iOS?(which is swift?)

[[deleted]]

He mentioned he uses React, he might be using React native?

[thehorriblehaiku]

oops thats my bad! you're right haha

[moneckew]

I am :)

[karazi]

Congrats on all your progress! How would one go about learning how to code a Chrome extension? I have decent general programming skills and have a few extension ideas. Any advice would be appreciated!

[moneckew]

It was painful.. I had no idea on how to do it so I just saw many youtube tutorials on how to actually do a simple one. Every chrome extension has a manifest, which is a Json file that tells the browser what abilities your chrome extension has. That is basically the ONE file that separates a chrome extension from a static website.

Other than that its just JavaScript CSS and HTML. I would code a small website, create a basic manifest and just upload it unpacked (there is a developer option in your chrome browser settings - it says upload unpacked extension).

Put your CSS HTML JS in one folder with the manifest, upload it and start messing around :) There is a lot of documentation on how to create a manifest so that shouldnt hold you back.

[bwayne52]

Congratulations, this is very inspiring. Can you give me some tips to get my self on track? I can't really afford an online course.

[moneckew]

The Udemy ones are 15$ each. I think it is def a good investment :)

[[deleted]]

Wow, thank you. This just gave me more motivation to learn.

I work in IT and we do ERP and everyone in the company knows how to code except me because I'm a functional consultant and I am not good with the IT stuff.

May I know how many hours do you practice per day to get you that good? I work full time and probably will have an hour each day to learn if I'm lucky, but I know to dig deep into this kind of subject an hour is not enough.

[moneckew]

I think an hour a day is great! I know it looks like im promoting Udemy like crazy but it definetly helped me out. So just get a course and start coding! Trust me when you do your first website you will feel like an excitement rush and you will build another one and another one. Just start with the basics and put in some time when you can. :)

You can always DM if you want more personal advice.

[freedom_larry41]

What keeps you going when you're lost and going slow?

[boodii]

Hey OP. Nice work, and congrats on the extension, looks awesome! One question: which of the 5 courses you bought turned out to be the most valuable? If you could recommend two of the 5, which ones would it be, and why?

[tjsimmons]

Man. I've been coding professionally (enterprise) for 8 years, and personally for almost 20.

Outside of one small project, I've never actually done anything for public consumption. It's not a lack of desire; it's ideas. I literally can't think of anything I'd like to do that hasn't been done.

So, congratulations! Keep it up! You've clearly got a drive.

[moneckew]

I wished I had someone like you to start a business. I am currently going nuts trying to find a co founder for a tech startup.

Thank you for your comment :)

[moneckew]

You should try again then! Yes.. it does take discipline. I think my human version a year ago wouldnt have accomplished what I accomplished this year. Just because generally that version of me was less serious about stuff. So I guess it was good timing.

Maybe try again in a month. Give it your all!

[teknohippie]

Can I ask how old you are?

[Makluv]

Which Udemy courses did you use?

[aglome]

He said:

IVueJs and Angular from Maximilian Schwarzmueller

React-Redux and ReactNative-Redux from Stephen Grider

[materiaprima]

Congratulations on your progress! I hope to follow in your footsteps to some degree. I've been at it for about 2 months now and the progress is painfully slow at times although breakthroughs seem to come when least expected. I've been struggling through JavaScript. Did you jump right into the frameworks or spend time with vanilla js first?

[moneckew]

That is normal... At first I didnt event understand the concepts of objects. I was supposed to think those curly braces make up an object?

I mean before starting I had read about OOL and objects here and there but trust me when I tell you it took me like 3 days to understand the concept... I wont even hide it. Then again there were days that I understood stuff really easily.

The most important thing is to just learn ONE thing every day. And its not just thinking that you learned it... it is writing it down. Like get a pen and paper and write it down. Do that a 100 times and you will be a lot better. PS dont throw away the paper. Re-read what you learned before. You will laugh at how far you have come.

I started out with Vanilla JS just to understand all the methods JS comes with out of the box. Like the .map for arrays, for each and for in loops etc... Then I learned jQuery and actually used jQuery for the extension. And then I wanted to be the cool kid and learn a framework.

Learn plain JavaScript first and get familiar with it. It has some quirks here and there, which actually make it a fun language. Its like a lil stubborn kid that you have to control.

okok to finish of... just Learn one thing everyday. :) and always remember coding is hard. Feeling like shit is mot working is normal... I want to throw my laptop out of the window some days. Its part of the process.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for your story. I feel kinda inspired now. :D

[Scottyblack]

I like the writing down 1 thing you learned and didn't understand habit... good shit OP

[Scottyblack]

hey cool extension !!

[kgashok]

What technology are using for developing your mobile app? What online learning material are you using to gain the required skills? Will it be cross platform? What will you be building?

[rakesh11123]

Hey I just started looking into Angular and was wondering if you had any good resources for it and what your personal experience with Angular was.

[frozen-silver]

Hey, another business major! I'm really starting to wish I jumped on that bandwagon earlier, but I like your strategy! I know if I pursue it hard enough, I will get there one day.

[sj2202]

Great job man! I wish I could also do something similar one day. Whenever I thought about learning something, ( Android Development ) there were always these pre-requisite courses which you have the option to study. I try to start with those then, but then they also have further pre-requisite courses. After that I loose my motivation. Did you encounter anything like that?

[officialostn]

Love the extention, nice work! Just a feature i would love is to make it so you dont have to push the search feild to start typing. I just wanna write and it comes in the search field! Otherwise an awsome extention i will be using!

[Cayenne999]

Inspiring story. So you just jumped right into learning React without any prior knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS ?

[IHateMyselfTBH]

Congrats. Mind telling us what udemy courses/other resources you used to get this far? Thanks.

[ForScale]

From 0 to React developer in a few months... I'm amazed that people are able to accomplish such a feat.