I’m curious about the most impactful videos or resources that have helped people kickstart their development journey.<p>If you were to guide a complete beginner, what’s the first thing they should watch or learn to build a strong foundation?
1. Decide on a non-trivial project. It doesn't matter what, but it should interest you at least a bit. It shouldn't be enormous ideally, but ultimately too big is better than too small.<p>2. Decide on the tech stack. It doesn't matter if your decision is not the best. There are no bad decisions. Stick to that stack for that project, no matter what.<p>3. Start breaking down the project to small steps, and start reading your stack's documentation like crazy, and googling your current step "how to display cats with SQL" or whatever. Implement that step.<p>4. Keep repeating step 3 until your project is done. This is the most important: don't stop until you finish.<p>5. Once you finish, you have learned a lot. It is time to reflect why SQL wasn't the most ideal choice to build a music player's frontend. (Also, it is time to reflect on how many other people could do the same).<p>Don't learn blindly from random youtube videos. Learn by doing.
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I'd open up Claude and start learning what data types are, and practical examples.<p>Once you know the constraints of <i>what</i> you are dealing with as a developer, you can then deal with the <i>how</i>.<p>There is a liberation from the unknown and empowerment once you realize the fundamental set of abstractions involved are the same across software that powers a website to that moves a spacecraft.<p>Most may begin to learn development by diving into learning a programming language. That route tends to throw people headfirst into learning grammar, syntax without contextualizing it to practice. This is like a developing human learning to speak before they've learned object detection!<p>What you demarcate, you can orchestrate.
I started with Mike Dane (Giraffe Academy) on YouTube. Watched his programming videos beginning with Python. I hadn't yet decided what area of programming I wanted.<p>Then I found Bucky Roberts (The New Boston) next, and watched videos on areas I was interested in.<p>Then I started looking for frontend projects to code along to and I stumbled on Brad Traversy (Traversy Media).<p>So, personally, I'd recommend either of these guys I just mentioned. After getting the basics down, just start building stuff. That's the only way to TRULY learn.