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My cousin told me to just 'jump in and build something' when I asked where to start with coding.
This was at a family BBQ last summer, and I was stuck trying to pick the perfect first language. He said, 'Pick a tiny project, like a number guessing game, and Google every single step.' It worked. What's a good first tiny project for someone who's never written a line of code?
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fiona_west213mo ago
Oh, your cousin gave you the only good advice anyone ever gives about coding. Honestly, a to-do list app is the classic first project for a reason. You'll immediately run into how to store the tasks, mark them done, and probably delete them, which covers a ton of basic concepts. Just be ready for your first version to be a text-only mess where you can't actually delete anything.
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tessa_murray3mo ago
Yeah, my first attempt just printed "buy milk" over and over in an infinite loop. I finally had to close the whole terminal window to make it stop, which felt like a pretty solid delete function.
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piper_kim3mo ago
My cousin gave me that exact speech three years ago at a diner, told me to make a weather app that just pulled data for one city. I spent two days just figuring out how to get the temperature to show up without crashing. The classic to-do list is perfect because you'll hit a wall on how to actually remove items, which forces you to learn lists or arrays. My first version just added tasks forever, a complete digital hoarder situation. That moment when you finally get the delete function to work is a real feeling.
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Heard a story from my buddy who tried to make a to-do list app for his first project. He spent three hours trying to get the "add task" button to actually add something, then accidentally deleted his entire internet history instead of the first task. He finally got it working by copying code from a YouTube tutorial line by line, but to this day he still can't explain what a function does.
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