How I learned to code in 2 hours...

How I learned to code in 2 hours...

Learning to code is a daunting thing for sure! There’s so much to learn, and so many languages. But here's how I learned to code in 2 hours!

Starting my journey...

It was an afternoon in a national lockdown, Covid-19 making its way around while we all made an effort to stay at home and keep safe. Many of us seized this as an opportunity to learn something new, and so did I. Boredom was an overwhelmingly consistent feeling throughout the height of the pandemic. Not seeing our friends, being limited to just one outing per day, and it being ultimately safer to avoid the shops. So in February of 2021, with 2 hours spare, I sat down and my journey began.

Finding the right language...

When you look at a coding language it can seem massively overwhelming. HTML isn’t like that. Yes, HTML isn’t a powerful programming language that could automate the world and do all these cool things, but HTML is still extremely powerful and even more useful.

When you visit a webpage, it’s built on HTML. Often when you install an application its interface is built in HTML. HTML powers so many things. HTML really doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves for the years it has served us for!

So with HTML being a simple yet powerful language and essentially the foundation of the web, I decided this was the starting point for my journey!

Where I began...

So cool, I’d decided on the language I wanted to start my journey with… now what?

It was at this point that I had to decide how I best learn and how I wanted to go about learning HTML. I looked at w3schools, but it’s a lot of reading and while you can go through it at your own pace, I needed visual learning, like video - with audio.

I did a quick search around YouTube and located the video that changed my entire view on the difficulty of getting into code. I found a 2-hour video from FreeCodeCamp which had been viewed over 4 million times, providing a full walkthrough of HTML and what each element does.

Moving on and developing my skills...

I spent a week after my initial 2 hours of learning to code in HTML practising building random pages with no styling, just getting a feel for how HTML works and remembering all the basic elements that are used repeatedly in every project!

After about a week of brushing up on my skills, I was confident with HTML. A whole language that I could comfortably code in after 2 hours of learning and then just everyday practice. That was crazy to think at the moment. I had gone from being terrified of code to being able to understand one of the most used languages in the world in 2 hours with a few hours here and there just practising.

From there I went on to study CSS and Javascript in the following weeks and started to build my first projects such as a basic calculator and a tech blog which quickly fizzled out as I started to focus more on where I could go next…

Why you should follow in my footsteps...

Learning to code is of course, not for everyone. Learning to code has however opened so many doors to me and enabled me to follow through with so many of my ideas and make other people’s ideas a reality with them at the same time through the power of the web development business (MJD Web Services) I was able to open just a month or two ago.

Learning to code has been a total game changer for me, I’ve been able not only to develop a new skill but open up new career opportunities, win prizes, and most rewardingly, bring my ideas to life.

What I've done since...

Since the start of my endless learning journey through the world of code I’ve worked on a lot of different projects. I have seen failure time and time again, but I have seen success just as many times and there is always bound to be a range of both.

Some of the projects I have been able to complete thanks to this one afternoon in February 2021 have been…

Having the ability to simply decide I want to build something new and building it is so rewarding and is what keeps me developing new things every day!