Ask HN: How did you learn coding

I read the elusive documentation (to a 12 year old me, very elusive) word for word and just went with it.

At the time, I didnt't know what a compiler or an interpreter was so I just wrote it all down on paper and did the calculations/instructions in my head and wrote down the results. (I couldn't tell if I had an error or not)

After about 2-3 weeks, I quit. I couldn't understand anything really. I had no idea what a class was or what a method did. About a year later, I heard of minecraft and started playing that. I heard it was made with java so I went on youtube (which I recently found existed) and watched java game development tutorials.

Needless to say, it was hard and I didn't udnerstand anything. I didn't know java or anything.

After about 2 months or so of frustration, I found the official tutorial on oracle and started learning from that. It was hard and I did not learn anything.

in 9th grade - 3 years ago - I took computer science as a math elective class. I learn java a bit slowly but I understand almost everything due to my past failed attemps giving me some foundation.

During the summer after 9th grade, I started learning python again. I got all the way up to classes and such and stopped because I couldn't understand OOP in python because noone could even begin to teach OOP with python. I felt inadequate so I temporary stopped (quit).

During 10th grade, I started to really learn java. I bought tons of books and used the official tutorial with various other websites, and after all of my hard work. I understand the basics of java.

Skip to now - 12th grade - I'm learning extensive OOP programming concepts with java and learn how to create GUI applications with awt and swing (holding off javafx for now).

I'm mostly self-taught despite going to classes for 2 years of computer science in highschool.

I just really want to say, through all of my 4-5 years of experience on and off of learning programming: If you don't understand something, come back to it later.

Phase 2: took a class in high school on Visual Basic and learned more on the side so that I could make games with it. Made a couple games with it.

Phase 3: took essentially Java Programming 101 at a local community college concurrently with high school, and started to get serious about making games.

Phase 4: made about 30 projects in Java—just whatever I felt like working on at the time—games, game engines, an emulator, 3D model loading/animating/rendering library, tools for making content for games. Almost none of these were completely finished but I learned a ton with each, and sort of climbed a ladder with it, trying progressively more difficult things all the time. This lasted ~3 years.

Phase 5: got a repetitive strain injury from typing/mousing too much and stopped coding (not completely, but nearly) for several years. Studied mathematics and language more deeply than what school prompted me to previously, somewhat hoping this knowledge would come in handy if I could return to coding some day.

Phase 6: decided to work on a major project that I believed would allow me to efficiently write code with motion sensors (thereby avoiding the injury). This ended up being a pretty deep, difficult project that was actually doing something sort of novel in software for the first time, and I learned tons working on it over the next year and a half, primarily about programming languages and architecture (http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext).

Phase 7: I've been writing software professionally off and on for a few years now, still occasionally returning to side projects. I still retain an awareness for areas I can improve, but it's more about using than developing skills now. I've returned to html/javascript after all these years. It's interesting.

At 17 a friend of mine asked me some help to port an old (and probably still working) COBOL app. Project wasn't really financed and absolutely not intended to be a production ready solution.

At 20 I was still working on that project. At that time in production and at least with the budget for us.

Year after year I can tell that my knowledge was totally community driven. Than.. I understood Unix (yes Microsoft was everything for 10 years). And I definitely understood how to code looking at other's code.

Btw. Thanks everyone for the open source.