How to learn to code more efficiently

hi my name is Kevin and here at my channel we learned how to make a web I'm gonna make it look good while we're at it with weekly tips tricks and tutorials and this week's video is a little bit different because instead of doing a cool CSS trick or tutorial or building something just gonna be talking a little bit but stick around because I think if you clicked on the original name and learning how to learn things faster and quicker and have a better understanding of it and this is a problem that seems to be really often we have these crisis of am i good at this and do i know enough of what I'm doing why am I not remembering these things they can be really demotivating if you don't think that you're learning fast enough or if things aren't sticking so I just want to start by saying it's normal don't be discouraged I've been writing CSS for like 15 years now on and off not continually the whole time at 15 years I think that's around when CSS was invented that makes me feel old but I've been doing it on and off for 15 years and I still forget things so I don't want you to be discouraged if you find yourself forgetting things or getting frustrated with things but for this video once you're past that once you okay maybe I'm gonna forget stuff maybe it's not gonna be super easy but there are things you can do to make it easier and that's what I'm gonna be exploring in this video quite a while back now both betrayer left this comment on one of my videos he said man there's just too much to memorize in CSS I feel like I don't make any progress because by the time I learn something new I forgot the last thing I learned yeah I know that feeling and well I'm quoting North betrayal on this this is something that I've seen a lot either through emails and just other comments in general just a screen shot at that one when I saw it because I because it's a concept that comes up or because it's a question that comes up so often um I thought it would be something that I that should be addressed because yeah it can be hard but there's definitely things that you can do to make it easier and my initial reply to him was not to get discouraged and that it's normal that it's hard the very first thing I want you to understand is that it's normal you're not going to understand everything right away we just don't have or most of us don't have that mental capacity I wish I did if you're watching this I'm assuming you know not everything just instantly clicks and that's a hundred percent normal and don't feel discouraged because of it so learning anything new is hard a lot of these tips that we're talking about they also apply to design so I always say you know learning how to make the web and how to make it better while we're at it and design is a lot of the same stuff I'm gonna keep saying coding in this one but if you're learning anything I think this same advice will apply it so it's not just necessarily for coding and the first thing to do is just do a lot of it like as much as you possibly have time for if you have a 10-minute little pause go encode something really fast you have four hours this afternoon or there's nothing planned just start coding stuff writing stuff making stuff the more you do the easier it's gonna get if you've ever been amazed by the top athletes or the top musicians in the world and like how can they possibly be that amazing it's something sure part of it is natural skill and that's just part of it a hundred percent but a part of it is because they put the time and the effort into it if you're watching people that are professional athletes they got there partially because of their skill but they are also so in love with whatever they're doing they're putting every single aching moment of practicing that skill that then you just see for an hour and a half or two hour game or whatever were they're blowing everybody away al it's practice practice practice practice repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition I think you get the point my son he desperately wants a skateboard for his seventh birthday buddy he also desperately wants me to get one too to learn with him and I know that if we do this I'm gonna have to be doing it a lot to be able to get better and I'm gonna have to encourage him to do it a lot to get better cuz it's turning seven he's gonna get demotivated pretty fast it's not gonna come naturally he's gonna be falling he's gonna be hurting self and I doing it along with them I'll really be hurting myself and all of that too but just showing them that you get back up you keep trying you keep trying you keep doing it and you'll get better at it and it's going to come but it's not I can't just step on a skateboard and expect to know how to skateboard I'm gonna have to put a lot of practice into that so this is the same thing with CSS CSS and even JavaScript even though JavaScript's a little bit different if you're getting frustrated that but all any coding I think is insanely repetitive but CSS is more repetitive than a lot of them because it's just property value property value property value and you're usually using the same properties and values over and over and over and over again it's repetitive by nature so just by doing it and building stuff you're repeating the same skills over again you don't try and memorize these things there's too much stuff to memorize and you're gonna memorize okay if I do this it works this way except and then you're gonna use it in a different context and it's gonna work differently and then you're gonna go and you're gonna be really upset because it doesn't make any sense don't memorize exactly how you think it should work to start using it and seeing how it works and it's not gonna work sometimes and that's frustrating but then you're gonna see why it doesn't work and then you're gonna remember that next time and it gets easier slowly but surely along with this principle of repeating it and just doing lots of stuff make real stuff it's fine if you know so you watch one of my videos and you're practicing along with me you have code pen open at the same time as the video and you're coding along and it works that's not enough a keep making stuff making stuff making stuff but take that thing you know I looked at the 5-minute Friday last week that's really cool huh that clip text an hour I can you know I can do it click text to an image that's awesome okay now use it and don't just use it in that code pimp open up a project do a whole page where you using it three times on that whole page if you're just doing something in isolation it's not gonna help you that much you need to use these things in context and use them in big projects so you start building up an idea of how it's actually useful you open up a little flex box thing or CSS grid tutorial and they're showing you how to make a layout but they're not putting real text in there and you're following along oh yeah grid makes a lot of sense and then you go and do it for real with real content it's not gonna behave the same way it's not gonna act the way you're expecting it to and that can be frustrating too so learn something practice it a lot but use build real projects and not one and go don't go okay I figured out great I've done one project on it build 10 pages with it then you're gonna start understanding it playing with the layouts changing things in the layouts coding coding coding and building real things and that could even mean going on to like be heads and finding a beautiful website and trying to code it and maybe you'll say there's some stuff on there I just don't know how to do so don't do it do this stuff you know how to do the stuff you're trying to figure out and along the way you're gonna learn a whole bunch of stuff and then you go find another one you find a working website that you think looks really cool don't look at the source code rebuild that website build out real full things and you're gonna learn so much more and a lot faster than just following along with tutorials and books and even my own videos these might be a nice stepping stone in the right direction but they're not gonna get you the whole way there in the real world it's so important if ever you're trying to learn JavaScript you might have gotten really frustrated because there's lots of really really really smart people giving you these examples to follow and you follow them along it's a little bit like economics in high school economics in high school is the best possible teaching opportunity the timing of it everything is there and they just screw the pooch with it if they take a concept that could be so important to these kids and remember being in there and going why am I sitting in this class it's a hundred percent useless to me I don't care about macroeconomics in high school they should be teaching economics that apply to you you have a job at McDonald's you're paying taxes you want to go with your friends how to budget your money off your minimum wage job how many hours a week do you have to work to do this and then you want to save up some and what if you start saving 10 bucks a week now how much will that be when you retire you know stuff like that that was real numbers numbers the kids can understand and use that's going to make sense to them it might actually get them interested in the subject instead of boring them with this macroeconomics theory and the theory so much of high school is theory and and learning theory is fine so much of school is theory all the way through and it's one of the biggest problems we have is we get stuck with fury and learning in a theoretical way and I think we don't learn in a doing way we learn to study and study and study because okay we need to read a book and write a report on it or I need to learn about this history and then regurgitate the facts of what happened when that's not doing things in the real world whether you're designing whether you're coding whether you're doing something interesting that's not healthy doing something interesting research can be interesting too but it's not the same skill set or same way of learning then when you actually have to take these things and put them into practice you're gonna learn by studying a little bit seeing someone else to do it watching one of my videos reading a tutorial reading something on CSS tricks whatever it is you'll learn a little bit there then you learn more by doing it and over and over and over and over again like I just talked about and you're not really focused on the theory you read your little tutorial and now you're doing it doing it so these JavaScript tutorials sometimes that you run into super smart people coming from computer science backgrounds talking about fizzbuzz and you're just going okay I know what a variable is I know what a function is I know what how to do loops but why do I need to know any of this it doesn't make sense you don't have it into a context that you can apply it you don't know what Szell Szell is here's some JavaScript free stuff and a course and he changed the way I see JavaScript and think about javascript and it was I should have figured this out on my own but I went from following all these things that were theoretical and trying to understand and trying to understand the deep theory of it and instead of that I just got frustrated and didn't really know why I needed and I knew I needed JavaScript to do stuff but I couldn't link the theory with the practical and he pretty much says don't you know stop worrying about the theory build stuff learn do you use it like I'm saying now you take stuff and you do it and it was my a light bulb went off for me I mean yeah why am I trying to understand the core concept here when I can let's understand how it works not not why it's working that's an and let's let's see how I can make it work and how I can make this thing happen and then I can start worrying more about the theory behind it a little bit but first I need to get it going I need to start building stuff with it making things happen on a website with JavaScript and then I can start worrying a little more about the why it's all working and for a little while you don't even have to worry about the why you just know it's working and you can keep doing that over and over again now I'm a teacher and I teach in two classroom and I teach people by telling them to do stuff and not by studying it I don't want I teach design I don't want them sitting there and studying the theory of design I want them looking at the theory of design understanding it just a little bit and then putting it into practice because by doing that okay why is this look like crap and why does this look good you made both of them this one worked out better why then we can dissect it a little bit same thing with it's a little bit different with design than coding there but the same ideas let's build let's build let's build and those theories are gonna start coming up and integrating in so it's funny that someone else had been you know mention that for my own learning but there it is and if you want to know more about zell there is a link down in the description below to his website and his javascript course might be closed at the moment but it will reopen and so even today i do go on to like the mdn or the official documentation to understand more about something but usually it's not when i'm putting it into practice its afterwards and usually it's when you know if the minister teaching something on this channel for example and actually it leaves really well the next point which is teaching you should be teaching things if you really want to understand them so a really short backstory for those who don't know i've been teaching in the classroom it's my fifth year as a teacher now i have this channel is entering its third year at this point so and before I started teaching I could do a lot of stuff I was comfortable with it whether it was design stuff or you know software whether it was coatings I do intro to coding classes at school as well I was comfortable I could do all of this stuff but when I started teaching it I started to understand it at a deeper level it just it made me have to understand it at a deeper level to be able to teach it now I'm teaching the classroom I'm not saying you should be teaching in a classroom I don't care who you teach you just need to teach somebody could be your brother your sister a friend your neighbor literally anybody volunteer at a community group where you're teaching the basics of how to make your very first website literally anything find somewhere to start a blog and even if no one's going there you're still going through the steps of teaching and you're going to understand things at a deeper and better level than you understand them now and you're gonna start when you start getting to that point where instead of just going through the motions of everything which is the first thing you have to do you have to be able to do it before you know you go through the repetition you're able to build a website you finally got there you can build a whole website now you're gonna teach someone else how to do that the next time you go to build it or the new things you're learning from there it's connecting to this deeper understanding that you've just built by teaching and it makes learning faster and so much easier because you now have this really deep and you know fundamental understanding of things you can't get that deep fundamental understanding just by reading the theory at the beginning you get there after and don't expect there's no shortcut or for most people I'm sure it's some people are just geniuses and they clicks but for most of us there's no shortcut it's about I said we're gonna learn faster by faster it means in a shorter amount of time because you're gonna be doing this all the time spending if this is something you're really dedicated to it's something you really want to get good at you have to put the work in and it doesn't matter how little you know right now you're just starting to learn you can is once you've learned it and you can teach it I'm not saying you're gonna claim to be an expert let people be honest with people with where you're at if your are an expert on a subject you'll be more of an expert if you're a beginner on a subject but you understand you're able to do some stuff on it you're going to be able to help people who don't have that knowledge students in my classroom the strong ones I love it and I encourage it for them to go and teach the weaker ones it's not to be life easier and give me less work it's because for the weaker student it gives them another point of view this person's gonna explain it differently than I've been explaining it all this time so it's gonna help the weaker student and then you the top student go from here to they just explode like it can bring the skill level of someone who's already really good so much higher once they start teaching it because again now they're understanding everything a deeper level so write a ton of code just write write write as much code as you can and make sure they're real projects when I say real projects I just mean not little things in isolation you're building out a single page website you're building out a multi page website you're copying other existing things it doesn't matter but just not things in isolation so lots of code but lots of larger projects to put everything into context and then once you've done that teach it teach people how you did that write a case study on it you know watch one of my videos put it into practice write a blog post on it it could be a journal to yourself you don't even need to be publishing this to the world if you're shy about it write a journal where you're teaching yourself how you did that because that you're gonna put you through the same mental process of understanding what you just did and your understanding of it is gonna make it stick so you're gonna practice writing it you're gonna write it's you know use it in three four different context then you're gonna write yourself a little journal thing or you gonna write a blog post you publish or you're going to make your own YouTube video on it or whatever it is but you're going to explain what you just did and how you did it and why it worked and that might mean going on MDM and reading a bit of documentation or it might mean going on the official documentation or wherever it is other websites and instead of just my own stuff but understanding a deeper theory and deeper understanding of it and what this is all these layers and different approaches on it it's gonna give you it's gonna make things stick more its so you're not necessarily learning more information faster if anything maybe it's taking you a little bit longer because you're doing it on a deeper level but then that's sticking and it's gonna make future learning a lot easier because you're building a foundational understanding of how CSS works everything on CSS is sort of built on top of itself so all of a sudden that you're gonna learn something new and go oh yeah that makes sense because of this over here same email with JavaScript once you start getting into JavaScript that's super hard it's not easy learn you go through all these steps and slowly but surely it all starts going through the same thing and it's going to make it in the long game much faster more efficient and I personally think more fun and rewarding as well whoo I got kind of jacked up for that video it's a topic I guess I'm more passionate about than I realized just because I think people don't realize that it isn't easy and but you can definitely learn in better ways you know if you've been doing something one way the whole time or if you've just done it twice it's not gonna stick you have to stick with it you have to be passionate about what you're trying to learn and you just got to keep pushing yourself and committing to it and doing it and doing it and doing it so I hope you found this video useful I'd love your feedback on this and if you have a blog if you have a youtube series of your own or the YouTube channel of your own or whatever it is that you already do leave a link down in the description so I can see it and other people can see it too they might get flagged as spam so if it doesn't show up right away I'll try it on flag them because the more stuff we have there the better and yeah if not just leave a comment leave some feedback I'd love to know what you you know your opinion on all of this and of course until next time don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome but also try and teach somebody to

Channel: Kevin Powell

Views: 14,438

Keywords: Kevin Powell, tutorial, html, css

Id: 2H0pgxy9PNo

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018