Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I Started Coding

Three years ago I decided I was going to be a software developer. I had no CS degree, no mentor, and no real plan beyond “learn to code and figure it out.” I spent the first six months doing almost everything wrong.

Here is what I wish someone had told me.

Stop collecting tutorials

My browser had 40+ bookmarked courses. Udemy, YouTube playlists, free bootcamp tracks — I was hoarding learning material like I was preparing for an apocalypse. I watched hours of content, followed along, felt productive, and retained almost nothing.

The shift happened when I tried to build something without a tutorial open. I could not do it. All that watching and I could not write a form handler from scratch. That was a rough afternoon.

The fix was stupidly simple: build things. Not follow along with someone building things. Actually open a blank file and struggle. The struggling is the learning. The tutorial is just the warm-up.

Nobody cares about your tech stack

I spent weeks agonizing over whether to learn React or Vue. Then whether to use Next.js or Remix. Then whether TypeScript was worth the overhead. Meanwhile I had not shipped a single thing.

Nobody who uses your app will ever ask what framework it runs on. They care if it works, if it is fast, and if it does what they need. Pick something reasonable and build with it. You can always switch later. You cannot get back the months you spent researching instead of building.

I went with React and TypeScript. They are fine. They would have been fine a year earlier if I had just started.

Read other people’s code

This one took me way too long to figure out. I was only ever reading documentation and tutorials — polished, simplified examples that do not look anything like real software.

Then I started reading actual codebases on GitHub. Open source projects, starter templates, apps built by people better than me. It was confusing at first. But I started recognizing patterns — how people structure projects, how they handle errors, how they name things. That taught me more about writing professional code than any course.

The best thing I ever did was clone a project I admired and just read through it file by file. No agenda, just curiosity.

Your first projects will be embarrassing

My first “real” project was a to-do app. Obviously. It had inline styles, no error handling, and a file structure that made no sense. I was proud of it for about two weeks until I learned enough to realize how bad it was.

That is normal. That is the process. Every project you build teaches you what not to do next time. The developers I look up to all have old repos they would rather delete. The difference between them and people who quit is that they kept shipping anyway.

Ask for help earlier

I used to spend entire days stuck on a problem because I thought asking for help meant I was not cut out for this. That is nonsense. Every developer I have met — experienced or not — gets stuck constantly. The good ones just get unstuck faster because they are not afraid to ask.

Stack Overflow, Discord servers, Twitter, even just explaining the problem to someone who does not code — all of it helps. The pride of solving everything alone is not worth the days you waste.

It gets better, but it never gets easy

Three years in, I am a much better developer than I was. I ship real projects. I get paid for my work. But I still google basic things, I still write code I am not proud of, and I still have days where nothing works and I wonder if I picked the wrong career.

That feeling does not go away. You just learn to trust that you will figure it out, because you always have before.