“Not knowing what you don’t know”

@josepheames brought this up in the “Learning Angular” podcast of @AngularShow

This was exactly me 6 yrs ago. I was a graphic designer who had written some html/css & I had an opportunity from a friend to learn back end coding on the job 1/

Before I took the job I signed up for a few $99 online courses from our local community college on HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and Visual Basic (the language I would be learning).

I had written a small amount of BASIC in middle school but was basically going in blind 2/

The job I was starting, was a sole developer role for a really small company with a very disorganized code base mostly written in http://VB.net  and classic aspx.

My boss knew a small amount of VB and was able to walk me through the code base I was meant to work in 3/

There was A LOT I didn’t know. I was basically given the advice to Google what I didn’t know, but most of the time I didn’t know what to Google.

These are a few tricks I picked up along the way to figure out what I didn’t know. 4/

1. I spent a lot of time in the Microsoft docs. If I at least knew the object type, I could go in and read about it’s built in methods and properties. (Also I could learn what methods and properties WERE!)
5/

2. When I Googled, I paid attention to the words the respondents used to answer questions. I would often find a better Google term buried in answers. 6/

3. I watched videos on YouTube and wrote down words I didn’t understand for Googling later. Sometimes all I would get out of a video was a list of things I didn’t know. 7/

4. I started making note of who the people were that were answering questions and writing blog posts that were helpful and I followed them on social media. They would often post new links to talks or other helpful tidbits 8/

5. I paid attention to conferences and asked my company to send me. If I went, I took a ton of notes (to Google later) and paid attention to what topics were being given so I could Google those later too. Even if I couldn’t go, I would follow all of the speakers on SM 9/

6. I started going to local user groups where I could ask questions to real people. BTW This is where I met the recruiter for my current company @SourceAllies 10/

7. And whenever I got the chance, I worked the new knowledge I gained into the code I was writing to practice. This is how I moved our code base away from VB and into C# and incorporated @angular on the front end 11/

8. I subscribed to @pluralsight to polish my skills. I like to first watch the video at 2X speed & take notes about what content is where so I can go back later and really watch as I try to use the skill I am learning in a code base that belongs to me. 12/

My biggest takeaway from learning to code is that you get out what you put in. It doesn’t work by osmosis. This is something @josepheames touched on in the podcast. That you can’t just watch a video and expect to retain or understand at the end. You have to own your progress 13/

And I also forgot #9 which is to listen to podcasts! Hearing people talk about coding got me used to talking about coding. I’ve learned new terms and found concepts being described in a different way. I can hear what other developers like and worry about. 14/

So thank you @AngularShow for the topic! Learning to code when you don’t even know what you don’t know can be terribly frustrating and wrought with imposter syndrome. I hope these tips help someone else on this path! https://www.spreaker.com/user/ng-conf/e023-learning-angular