I have spent most of my life surrounded by programmers and coding, but never really doing it.
Most of my friends while I was growing up became programmers of some sort, or work in the industry. I graduated as an automation engineer in 2003 after a few (poor and weird) programming classes myself. Shortly after graduation, I started a career in digital marketing that eventually required more and more technical and programming skills, yet I never learned coding and couldn’t do it to save my life.
A few years ago, I decided this has to change. You probably know the narrative — it is 2020 already, coding in the technology sector is as important as speaking decent English, I need it to do my job and get better etc. I felt it was important but I really had a hard time making it a priority.
So I enrolled in Telerik Academy in 2016. It is certainly the best software education on the market you could get. However I was unable to make learning coding a priority. Despite the Academy being in the next building and the classes were after my working hours, I made it to zero classes and missed my first, and turned out my last homework deadline. So I was out. Also I am notoriously autodidactic — everything I ever learned was on my own. Everything. Online environments and having my own pace naturally works great for me.
So, I signed up for Codecademy. That kept me on and off track for a year or so. I signed up and canceled my subscription a dozen times. All those times I thought that it was my fault I am probably not really interested in coding that is on my way of finally completing a course and learning decent Javascript.
And that was until yesterday, when I spent 2 hours in this Youtube playlist and learning more in an hour than I did for a year in Codecademy. Really. I was ecstatic.
Why is it different (at least for me)?
- In these videos, Mosh is coding live and explaining every word and line — why is he doing it, why is it important etc and everything he does I do myself in my own Visual Studio Code, terminal or browser. Not in an artificial Codecademy environment that I do not really understand how it is connected to the working browser.
- every concept is explained on the go verbally by someone who explains things simply. This particular guy, who I have never heard of before, explains things slowly and in a very simple way. This is critical for someone with close to zero experience.
- no theory that you do not need, and which sounds like a very long blah-blah. Coding by nature is full of abstract theory, if the abstracts are not easy to understand in practice, I am totally clueless what that means and I am just a reader of a boring text. So the whole theory panel in Codecademy, which is a third of the screen in the app, is useless to me.
- cost is pretty much the same — $20/mo in Codecademy, and $18/mo with Mosh. I will even have $24 more within a year to buy something nice. Like a nice haircut.
Mosh has detailed courses on his website that cover 99% of my coding interests, so I already canceled my Codecademy subscription (again) and will move on to his courses ($18/mo — all access) when I am done with the Youtube playlists.
I also found that in the freeCodecamp Youtube account there are (recorded) streams of much more complicated projects that I can pick up when I am done with Mosh.
This was my greatest find of the week, so I had to share.