This founder learned basic programming in 3 months to understand his programmer

Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin.

I started running a mobile chat app service after quitting my job at a multinational company. But before we get into the details, here’s a little background:

I majored in business at a university and my work background was all about business planning in a corporate strategy department. So, I’m sure you can imagine how difficult it was to be a web/mobile product manager who’s working with a programmer in my startup.

This is why I wanted to share how I studied programming so I could work with and correctly communicate my thoughts to programmers.

I want to emphasize that this method can only work for people who simply want to learn what the programming world is like and the process of building web/mobile products. These guidelines will not work for people who want to become real developers.

Step 1: Get a taste of web programming via YouTube (1 week)

The biggest problem with self-studying is that people always give up in the beginning because they feel overwhelmed. Studying web programming is especially difficult for someone who doesn’t have a programming background. You may often here programmers say, “All you need to do is put this code in and run the batch script.” This may be simple to programmers but it is gibberish to non-programmers.

To avoid giving up in the beginning, I strongly recommend first getting a glimpse of the web programming world by watching a free YouTube course. Do not try to install or build anything the course mentions. Just watch the entire course in a week. The purpose of just watching is to see the whole programming process and understand the big picture.

I recommend the free courses by LearnCode.academy. They give an overview of the web programming process, basic programming languages, and structures of web development. Again, do not try anything that the course says, just watch. You can watch the courses before beginning a programming bootcamp. You can even snack on popcorn and beer to make watching more enjoyable.

Step 2: Complete Ruby on Rails Bootcamp on Udemy (8 weeks)

Nowadays, there are so many online academies such as Udemy, Udacity, Khan, Coursera, and Lynda. I think all these websites provide great programs, and they have their own value propositions. Because our goal is to learn programming to work with programmers (and not to become programmers), I recommend Udemy.

Udemy is perfect for someone who wants to learn something in a short period of time, while Udacity is for someone who wants in-depth curriculum.

After watching the YouTube courses from Step 1, you will see that the programming world consists of two major parts: the server side and the client side (front-end) programming. You will also learn about the programming languages (Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.) and frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django, CodeIgniter, etc.). You don’t need to fully understand the concepts. Just knowing the difference between the programming languages and the frameworks is enough.

Briefly, programming languages are linguistic syntax and the grammar used for computers. Frameworks are a group of classes and libraries designed to run a specific operation system. It’s easier if you understand the difference in the following way:

If you want to speak with Koreans, you will need to know how to speak their language. In the same way, if you want to communicate with your users via web pages, you need web-based languages to deliver your message. Moreover, it will be easier and faster to communicate with Koreans if you know quite a few Korean phrases. Likewise, you can make your website more accessible if you use a framework because there are a variety of pre-made sets of syntax and libraries you can use.

You may also need to understand the level of computer languages. There are high-level and low-level languages, but don’t be fooled by the name. High-level is not considered better than low-level. The levels are simply different. If the computer language syntax is more similar with the level of human language, it’s referred to as high-level. On the other hand, it’s called low-level if the language is used more on a hardware level such as CPU or OS. This is also called as machine code or assembly language.

Step 3: Learn Bootstrap (1 week)

Step 4: Download fully coded Bootstrap website and create your own portfolio website (3 weeks)