So you want to learn to code. Great! You pick up a couple books, maybe from Mark Meyers’ A Smarter Way To Learn series, you sign up to watch some tutorials on something like Treehouse, and you download a text editor. You learn some simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript and before you know it there are pictures, and colors, and words in all different types of fonts and sizes appearing in your browser. It’s amazing! You made it happen with just a link up here, and some scripts down there and various types of tags in between.

You’ve made a pretty rapid climb up the first slope of learning to code. But now things are starting to get a bit more chewy. Things aren’t happening on your screen the way you expect them to and you can’t figure out why. Imposter Syndrome is starting to set in. Your confidence is severly shaken. You’re starting to feel like there is no way anyone would ever actually pay you to do this stuff. Congratulations! You’ve begun your descent into the valley of despair.

So you dig deeper into the docs and you’re wearing out Google and Stack Overflow looking for answers. You keep plugging away at it because you haven’t forgotten that feeling of how great it is when everything works. You slowly begin to build your knowledge base without even realizing it. All you can see is that mountain of stuff you don’t know in front of you. In fact, you don’t even know what you don’t know!

The good news is that you don’t have to know everything. Nobody does. Even people who have been developing software for years don’t have all the answers. What they do have is experience. Experience that will help them find an answer. Experience gained by making that long, slow crawl up and out of the valley. So don’t fear the mountain of unknowns ahead of you but embrace it instead. Embrace it as an opportunity to learn some cool new stuff.

The valley of despair is very real, as are the feelings of frustration, aggravation, and self-doubt that you will find there. But every bit as real is the feeling of joy that comes with each little victory, the thrill of having overcome an obstacle, and the excitement of seeing your code come to life on the screen.