How I Taught Myself to Code in Eight Weeks

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To a lot of non-developers, learning to code seems like an impossibly daunting task. However, thanks to a number of great resources that have recently been put online for free— teaching yourself to code has never been easier. I started learning to code earlier this year and can say from experience that learning enough to build your own prototype is not as hard as it seems. In fact, if you want to have a functioning prototype within two months without taking a day off work, it’s completely doable.



Introduce Yourself to the Web Stack (10 Minutes)


Get an Introductory Grasp of Python and General Programming Techniques (1 Weekend)

  • Learn Python the hard way: Despite the title, the straightforward format makes learning basic concepts really easy and most lessons take less than 10 minutes. However, I found that the format didn’t work as well for some of the more advanced topics, so I’d recommend stopping after lesson 42 and moving on.
  • Google’s Python class: Read the notes and / or watch the videos and do all of the associated exercises until you get them right—without looking at the answers. Struggling through the exercises I kept getting wrong was the best learning experience. I would have learned far less had I just looked at the answers and tried to convince myself that I understood the concepts.


Get an Introductory Understanding of Django (1 Weekend)

  • Work through the Django tutorial.
  • Delete all your code.
  • Work through the tutorial again, from scratch.




Get a Deeper Understanding of Python/General Programming Concepts (2-4 Weekends)



Practice Building Simple Web Applications (1 Weekend)


Build Your Prototype (1 Weekend)



Author’s Note: It goes without saying that there’s a huge difference between the relatively cursory amount of knowledge needed to build a simple prototype (the focus of this post) and the depth of knowledge and experience needed to be a truly qualified software engineer. If you want to learn all that it takes to build modern web applications at scale, getting professional web development experience at a fast-growing startup like Yipit is a great next step. If you’re smart, hard-working, and passionate about creating amazing consumer web experiences drop us a line at—we’re always looking for great people to join our team.


How I Taught Myself to Code in 8 Weeks | Yipit Django Blog

David Sinsky started at Yipit without any prior coding knowledge. Before long, he was a full developer contributing features directly into the code base.


Yipit collects local deals and online sales from thousands of sources and puts them in one place. Over 1 million people use Yipit to get a daily digest of the deals in their city and the online sales from the stores they follow.

Image remixed from ollyy (Shutterstock).

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I still don't recommend python as a first programming language to learn as although it will teach you the fundamentals of programming logic, for loops, etc etc phython syntactically (and in a lot of other ways) is very different from most of the other popular languages.

For me Java is the perfect starting spot, its syntax is fairly easy to understand but gives you a better overall idea of what the majority of other languages are like compared to python.