Learn to code in twenty minutes a day

The hard part of learning to code is rarely the code. It’s the size of everything around it: which language, which course, which tools, how long it will take. Twenty minutes a day only works if each day has one clear thing to do.

Pick one language for one thing

Choose by what you want to make, not by what’s popular this year. Pages for the web start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript1. Automating something on your own computer, or working with data, is a good reason to start with Python2. Either is a fine first language. The second one comes much faster than the first.

Pick one course and stay with it for a month. Switching courses feels like progress and isn’t.

Build something small before you feel ready

Reading about code is not the same as writing it. As soon as you know a little, make something tiny that’s yours: a page about your dog, a script that renames your photos, a tip calculator. It will be ugly. It will also teach you more than three more chapters would.

Twenty minutes, most days

Stop in the middle of something, not at the end of it. If you know exactly what you’ll do next time, starting again takes seconds instead of a whole evening of deciding. A day you miss doesn’t undo anything. The code you wrote is still there.

Get stuck on purpose

You will spend a lot of your time stuck. That’s the work, not a sign you’re bad at it. Read the error message slowly, all of it, before you search for it. Most of them say what went wrong and where. Courses with exercises you can run in the browser make this easier at the start3.

Keep what you made

Save every small thing you build, in one folder, with the date. In a few months you’ll look back at your first page and see how far you came. That folder is a better measure than any count of days.

Sources

1. 1MDN Web Docs: Learn web development (HTML, CSS and JavaScript, free)
2. 2The Python Tutorial (the official one, free)
3. 3freeCodeCamp’s curriculum (free, in the browser)