30 Posts In 30 Days – Day 23: Coding

This is Day 1 of the 30 Posts In 30 Days Challenge I set for myself to start writing online. This post was originally published on X.

My first experience with coding was pretty bad.

It was way back, during my IT apprenticeship. I don’t remember the exact name of the module but it was an introduction to programming with Java.

Worst. Introduction. Ever.

I immediately knew that writing code wasn’t for me.

Boy was I wrong.

A few months went by.

I slacked through the module without anything making any sense at all.

In the meantime, I learned some HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP.

I saw some quick results and learned how to build my first website with WordPress.

I loved the combination of code and design, and getting immediate feedback for my input.

But it wasn’t enough to change my mind about coding.

Until a friend introduced me to the Ruby programming language.

Things finally started to make sense.

And when I found out about the web framework Ruby on Rails, things got even more interesting.

• The syntax didn’t feel clunky at all
• The framework gave me a certain structure
• I was able to ease into learning how to write code

I went from “Hello World” to my first web app in only a few hours.

And then I realized that this gave me the ability to build whatever I could imagine.

Best. 2nd introduction. Ever.

Fast forward to today, I’m writing most of my web apps with Ruby on Rails.

I still use WordPress for a lot of smaller websites, blogs, or portfolios.

But whenever I have to touch a piece of PHP code, I immediately wish I could go back to Ruby.

So let me make this easy for you.

Let me save you thousands of hours and brain cells that you’d spend on figuring out how to get into coding.

If you want to learn how to build your own projects for the web, I’d recommend starting with Ruby on Rails.

And if you need help or direction, let me know.