TL;DR: guided tutorials creating visual effects through visual code is the easiest onramp to coding.
For folks who don’t have several hours a day to devote to acquiring a new profession, you can still learn programming painlessly over time using visual code to program games.
I’ve ordered these from easiest and most playful to most like real programming. If one stumps you, go back to an easier one until you’re comfortable and confident again. Practice a few times a week or, even better, a little bit each day.
Once you realize that you can code and figure stuff out, you may be ready to prepare for a full time job programming. Check out my other posts geared towards that.
TL;DR: watch online tutorials for and make your own projects with nextjs (react and typescript), and java spring boot.
Just skip past what you already know. The links below are free but it is more time efficient to get a paid subscription to LinkedIn Learning or Pluralsight for only a few hundred dollars. That way you have access to curated content that is time efficient.
Learn the lingo
Before you’re ready to follow along, it helps to get the lay of the land and the vocabulary.
Follow step by step tutorials on your own computer
Front-end
Now that you have the lay of the land, it’s time to get a website running on your own computer. The easiest way to get started in 2021 is to 1) Download https://code.visualstudio.com/download and 2) follow a video tutorial on next.js to learn react, javascript, frontend and backend development. Javascript is the #1 language on the web, you can use it on the front and backend. Typescript enhances javascript with types.
You can follow https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Front-end_web_developer to get a more holistic introduction to front end web development.
Back-end
Yes, Nextjs is also a backend but it is good to round out your knowledge of the backend by learning Java Spring Boot. Most backends are written in Java at Carfax and Java is also the #2 language on the web today.
Now that you’ve watched a few tutorials, it is time for you to start building something on your own. Come up with an idea for a website or app and try to build it. You will get stuck. You will look around the web for answers. You will watch other people doing similar things. You will persevere and figure it out. This is web development! Frustrating and fun.
Work with a buddy on a project. At Carfax, we get stuff done as a team using scrum so it would be great to see that you have some experience with that.