Create smarter, do action

Original written 23 Jun 21

“Create things that you think should exist, work smarter by working on things you enjoy the process of solving. Do not wait around for the perfect idea to start working, learn and create progress through action. Some of the best things are the most obvious.”

— I had this thought stuck in my mind on how to convey a simple & effective message on how to self-learn software programming & creating project ideas.

For me, I started early doing game modding/development, then started using 3D modeling & leveling design tools, and eventually transitioning into object-oriented programming alongside working on new frontend & software projects whenever my friends or I had a cool idea. Some people can learn doing coding challenges with tools such as Code Academy, which is fine, but some of the best programmers I’ve met got their knowledge through messing around and working on stuff they were genuinely interested in and enjoyed doing, why else would you want to get into programming?

If you want to get into programming or just need to come up with a good idea; always start small, don’t expect to create a market-dominating product when you’re in the early stages of learning. Even large companies/very experienced developers start their projects small, by developing an MvP. I have always aimed to have a market-viable/working solution within a two-week period, try not to get stuck working on something for months on end with nothing to show, starting with a clean slate after getting some experience from a project is a great way to learn.

Simple project ideas

Create a Discord Bot with Nodejs, these bots have the ability to be in multiple servers, communicate with multiple servers at the same time. With this you can easily add dice rolling, create admin tools which can check user role permissions, check chat messages for bad content/words and there is more complicated stuff you can work towards like leveling systems for users, voice chat music players, text RPG games.
Create a website to show nearby restaurants, mess around with displaying data from the Google Maps API, you can then move into learning about database systems and creating cool stuff like review systems, commenting, recommending restaurants to people.
Feel free to copy & modify code to learn how people do things, how stuff works. With websites & web apps, use the inspector tool to edit classes, view CSS style sheets, view networking POST & GET requests to see how websites send and receive information.
Or if you just want to learn… create a website with Bootstrap, learn about CSS, HTML, Javascript + jQuery
Want to learn the most “important” or “relevant” tool sets? Learn NodeJS and React, that’s what 90%+ of startups use and it’s relatively easy to learn, however, if you want something to aim for; I recommend learning C# and Visual Studio, just download the latest version of visual studio and click “Create a new project” and start googling :-)

Either way, just find something to work on and you’ll find cool stuff along the way.

Learn more about action here
From the book Atomic Habits