Lessons from a Coding Noob.

Painful realisations you only make through experience.

1. 80% of the time you’ve probably just forgotten a full stop or a bracket.
2. If this fails, save yourself some mind-numbing hours scoping out full-stops and check that your file path/file name are correct.
3. Test. Again, and again, and again, and again… You and Cmd-R are about to become very tight friends.
4. Sometimes you’re only going to ‘get it’ if someone explains and demos it. Find yourself some developers and ask a shit tonne of questions. Alternatively — watch some videos.
5. Your editor won’t look colourful and exciting* until you’ve saved it as a .html file first.
   * ‘exciting’ is a very generous term.
6. Forget everything you learnt from coding eDM’s. <tr> and<td> are out. <div> is the new black and she’s kinda a bitch…
7. Well, at least until you discover her achilles heel — Introducing:

<container>
  <div row>
    <div col-lg-12 col-md-12 col-sm-6 col-xs-6>
      <p>A well behaved text block</p>
    </div> 
  </div>
</container>

8. <div col-lg-12 col-md-12 col-sm-6 col-xs-6> is also going to solve all your responsive problems — she’s the real MVP.

9. Do not expect great things in 2 hours of work. You will probably optimise some text and add an image, let’s be real here…

10. Give yourself a purpose and reason to practice. Find a friend, local business or charity that you can develop for. Hell, even do it for free! (*gasp!*)

11. Realise that what you’ve learn’t here can merely be considered markup languages. Yes, I’m talking about html and css. If you want to be a coder… well Javascript awaits you my friends!

Happy coding!

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Hi, I’m Kate — just Kate.

An aspiring unicorn — part designer, part writer, part coder who is working remotely from Whistler, BC for a Sydney start-up — ManageFlitter (soon to be ManageSocial). You can also listen to me bumble my way through the It’s a Monkey Tech Podcast once per week.

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https://twitter.com/katefrappell
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