I’ve been coding for 15 years. Here’s how you can learn to do it easier

Recently, several amazing visualizations of the various technologies web developers use surfaced online. One of them (geared toward backend developers) is pictured here:

Photo credit: kamranahmedse.

These visualizations are great resources for both beginners and experts. They lay out what technologies you should be aware of if you want to get a job as a frontend or backend web developer or system administrator.

But I think they are especially useful to absolute beginners learning their first few lines of code.

Here’s why.

I’ve been programming for over 15 years. I consider myself to be a full stack web developer, so everything shown in these visualizations falls into my domain in one way or another.

Taking a look at the photo above is pretty scary, right? But they’re not a map of everything you need to know to be a developer. Do you really think I—or any developer—actually knows how to use all this stuff?

Not a chance.

When you’re just getting started with computer programming, it is absolutely overwhelming. And like thousands of others, you’re probably making a very understandable mistake: You think you’re supposed to know everything there is to know about programming.

You’re not. And no one will ever expect you to.

Even after years as a developer, I only know a small fraction of the technologies in those pictures at an “expert” level. But if you sit me down for an hour with any of them, I can probably put them to use. And that’s because I know how to learn like a developer.

As a developer, you will always be fighting a losing battle if you try to stay on top of every new technology. There are just too many of them and they’re changing faster than ever.

So, rather than spending your time trying to learn every programming language and technology, you should instead learn how to learn like a developer. Here’s what that means:

Learn how to read documentation

Here’s an example for Python file input and output. And here’s an example of a similar library in Golang.

Learn how to read source code

Learn how to debug code

Learn how to ask for help

Conclusion