khandev

So possibly a tip is to have a notebook per project and write all your plans, ideas. It is a record of a cool journey filled with learning new things and solving new problems. 

Sometime I enjoy going over the old code I've written for my projects. It's a peculiar experience. I do not write comments much so it's a rare experience to see a comment which allows me to focus on that moment. Today, I did go over a jQueryMobile project I did. Looking at the 200 lines of code, it's pretty straightforward. The funny thing is, I didn't actually know what I was doing when I wrote it. This also happens with large projects when the idea is bigger the methodology I follow to make it a reality. As a result, I end up with spaghetti code, not to mention the occasional long hours wasted messing with a line that won't work instead of understanding the entire scope. Ah...noobie mistakes. 

Programming is not something you study, memorize and implement. It's sort of like writing. You learn the grammar and then try to write a small essay and later work on a novel. In each endeavor, you will fail, forget words and have to research. So the bottom line is if you want to learn how to program, do projects! As many as you can. Struggle through them because the value lies in overcoming them. Stop making lists of what to learn ahead. Dive in! I guarantee you will catch up quickly. In my early programming stages, I regret reading too many books or watching all those repetitive videos. I really took off when I was able to tackle projects. And I learned that other programmers, even on large development teams still don't know concepts but look them up and keep going. Don't feel the need to study and attack the field so hard from the start.

As soon as I began writing Parse code, with Backbone code, my work skyrocketed. Within an hour, I had setup a login, signup, and password retrieval system as well as a user session for the single page app. That's a week of work I spent trying to mess with Nodejs.