For Anyone Who is Afraid of/Resistant to Learning to Code.

Reports from my first month learning JavaScript

This…is not what coding is. Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

So, I am a writer, a storyteller, an artist, and I absolutely hate, loathe, detest when people tell me to learn to code to make money. I want to make money doing what I love. And sometimes, that actually happens!

But I do enjoy learning, and I hate thinking that I’m refusing to learn out of pure spite. A month ago, I began (sort of) learning JS, CSS, and HTML (which I already kind of know from my Xanga and MySpace days).

I don’t think I’m going to learn JS and start pulling a crazy salary, and honestly, the idea of it makes me shiver with self-loathing just a little bit. However, if you’ve been curious about coding, there are some things I personally found surprising:

1. There’s like, no math or calculations involved.
   I mean, other than basic divide, multiply, add, and subtract. I used to think coding was a lot of math. It’s not. It’s really more like logic puzzles. Think of it more like…Sudoku. You’re just kind of setting up a bunch of rules so everything works out in the end.
2. A lot of it…exists on the internet already.
   Honestly, for me in my beginner stages, it’s a lot of like…copy/pasting, and using templates and just changing stuff to make it fit what you want…