My Journey to Create a Coding Space for Coders (Learn to Code Without CS Degree)
Transform your life with coding skill
Since Feb 2022 when I left my full-time developer job, I have been committed to my startup projects, and also passionate about the idea of building up a community to help people transform their lives by learning to code.
So, Who Am I? Why do I believe I should do this?
As an ex-doctor (clinical physician) based in China who obtained her Ph.D. degree in The Netherlands four years ago, I don’t feel regret about shifting my career from medical field to the software industry. There are several reasons for my decision but the most important one is I favor freedom a lot. As a developer who knows how to code, I can code anywhere and anytime, and compared to performing clinical practice in a hospital, I could quickly transform my ideas into realistic products to become a digital solutions to problems. Learning to code is one of the best choices I have made in my life. To be honest, I find myself so lucky to be able to land a professional developer job in a beautiful western country — The Netherlands.
With that priceless working experience, it gets much easier for me to land another developer job back in Shanghai, China.
.But then I left my full-time job to become an unemployed person after working for nearly two years during the pandemic period. The top reason is because I want to put my idea into practice by creating my own products and have my own time back to myself rather than committing to a 8-hour daily job. I personally prefer freedom more than anything money can buy. Ok, just personal choice. You don’t need to copy my choice.
Since this post is mainly about why and how I take actions towards to creating a Coding Space, I only share relevant projects in here, but my startup project will be shared more in detail in future posts as well.
My finished mini-projects
Published my first eBook
I have published my first eBook, Become a software developer without a computer science degree (click here to download), in which you could find all the details about why and how I shifted my career from medical field to software industry. Inside the book, some detailed strategies are also introduced to provide a better guidance for complete beginners.
Learning to code is one of the best choices I have made so far. And I feel so lucky to be provided the job opportunity as a professional developer in two different IT companies — one is a software agency while the other one is a global eCommerce business company.
Published my first online class on Skillshare
It took me two months to finally have my first Skillshare class released to public. Why did it take so long? I have wrote a post about the story behind the scene: https://amy-juan-li.medium.com/published-my-first-skillshare-class-3d2d443970e1. The main reason is because I didn’t pay enough attention the Skillshare Class Guidance. 😅😆
BTW, if you are interested in getting access to one-month free membership of Skillshare (once you stop your payment plan within a month, you’re not charged) to access all the classes on the platform, including mine, you could enter through this Skillshare referable link.
My ongoing mini projects
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” -Lao Tzu
Working on my first desktop app — task management tool
V1 (scheduled release on Sep 2022): create, update and delete your tasks/scheduled events; calendar and task Kanban options.
V2 (scheduled release on Oct 2022): fully customisable (users can choose which task management workflow to use)
Building a tech blogging platform
I love writing on Medium, but I don’t think there are space to be improved to provide a more user-friendly writing system for coders. So this project will borrow some nice features from Medium and other tech platforms as well to make a simple, clean, and tech-friendly blogging platform. This project idea has been developed for nearly six months, it’s time to start bring it out to public, which will be my next month’s goal.
Building a tech forum
The core part of creating a Coding Space is providing a place to have people interact with each other by sharing various ideas, tech knowledge, and any useful resources for coders. I have been a big fan of freeCodeCamp for nearly four years, in which place I wrote my first HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. Above all, I appreciate the idea of non-profit organisation to help people like us who want to learn to code on their own without going to a uni to study programming. Maybe I could help the Chinese audience who cannot understand the learning materials and online class taught in English very well. Anyway, I want to be a part of this ecosystem, so it’s time to pay attention to this ongoing project as well, and the deadline for thee MVP is on Oct 2022. Just do my job to try to meet the smaller deadline before the bigger ones.
Summary
So far, I have shared the mini projects I have finished as well as other ongoing ones. I will record my journey of working on every mini project around this goal — creating a Coding Space.