I’ve coded on and off for about 5 years. But frankly, I’m not very far in my learning journey. Much of this has been compounded by AI now coming to the fore and making it very easy to build things, but harder to learn them.

The problem is that if you are someone who likes solving problems, you have always focused on the quickest path to do it. Before it was Google, now its LLMs. How do you ensure you are still learning how to think? Well you have to do it the old fashioned way.

17th March 2025

Started learning Flutter today, but all I got done after 2 hours was getting the setup to work, for a non-coder this was a lot harder than javascript. Mainly, the difficulty was trying to get the virtual machine to work and hot reload. I have managed to do this, and load a basic app. Fun times!

Of course, I naturally then asked copilot to make the idea I had in mind and it did this in 5 minutes. So I’ve banned myself from VSCode for now and will come back to it in due course. If I’m going to learn anything I have to spend the time.

18th March 2025

Today, I started working through Codecademy, the beginner course. It is a little bit complicated in the language for someone without much coding experience. So whenever I get lost I get ChatGPT (for now this seems better for Claude for this use case) to explain it to me. After it is explained to me, I then I asked it to do a quiz on each new concept or line of code, depending on the context. It then explains things in more friendly terms as I need them. This has really helped me understand what each block is doing. My brains thinking aligns (I believe) works well with coding, but it just needs some prompting of its own for concepts to go in. I’m trying to go slow and steady rather than sprint (which is what I normally do). I will complete a lesson this way each night with a minimum 1 hour spent.

22/03/2025

I’ve set a target of 30 minutes of coding a day, it’s on the fridge. My girlfriend is focused on building her own (unrelated) business, her tasks are next to mine. It’s a good way to keep us both motivated. I moved over to freecodecamp.org and donated while I was halfway through the pyramid generator (part of Javascript Data Structures and Algorithms)

I made the donation for a few reasons

1.) First and foremost, it’s a great product and a great mission that deserves support. For much of my life, I have been cheap on things like this. I want to be better.

2.) Removing the scarcity mindset, focusing on abundance. What you put out you get back.

3.) I am more likely to stay committed to the cause if I have given some money to it.

I am enjoying it as the challenges are mostly more than one part. They require a bit of thinking through. It’s been good to think through the basics.

Whilst I am still learning, I want to keep my 1 or 2 AI assisted projects going, as they can keep bringing in the money while I learn.

My site: aplant.org is hitting 900+ views per month. I want to get to 10k as a first stop and then 100k which I think is in reach. I have a lot of optimisation to do.

25/03/2025

Downloaded “Go Book” last night and have been working through it. I had tried it before, but after spending a bit more time in the algorithms & data structures, this now makes more sense. So today, after work, I have spent 1 hour working through intro to Golang on Codecademy. So far I like it, although now I have got to numerical types it seems to be getting scarier. I feel this is the hurdle I must overcome to unlock a lot of potential.

I will see what happens once I have completed this. I know I could just use Node.js for the backend, but I like the idea of being able to make an API or something more advanced in the backend. IDK. I’m enjoying having to think about how to solve problems, and I think it will help with javascript too. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like the thinking is coming along.

Now to bed with GoBook. I like reading before bed and going back over the concepts to cement them. I like thinking of efficient ways to do simply tasks using Go. It’s fun! At least for now – I’m sure the dopamine will run out soon!