Being Utterly Fearless in Your Pursuit of Learning to Code with Alex Morton

#codeland #career

Hey there! I'm Alex - a California native lost in France who fell in love with coding as a hobby while working in customer support.

I took the plunge to leave my last job to teach myself to program on a full-time basis at the start of 2020.

I'm a big fan of visiting (and revisiting!) different cities around the world, as well as the many books on my bookshelf.

My talk, Being Utterly Fearless in Your Pursuit of Learning to Code, will cover:

My background and the lessons I've learned as I've taught myself how to code
My why for showing up everyday to learn to code was wanting to put myself in a more influential position in my career and to build meaningful apps and programs - especially as a woman in tech
Switching my mindset from one of being anxious about the unknown to finding inspiration and power in it

In this talk, you'll learn how to:

Cultivate your own why and reason that keeps you coming back to your code editor each day
Err on the side of taking action (instead of over-thinking any decision)
Dive in and identify any gaps in knowledge as you learn to code
Be the creative director of your own life
Play the long game and have a ton of fun

Whether you’re learning to code full-time on your own, going through a bootcamp, getting a degree for it, or if you’re simply carving out a consistent hour of your time each day or week -- stay with it.

This is a time of investing in yourself and in your future.

Stay cool, stay creative, and be utterly fearless in your pursuit of your dream of learning to code.

Resources mentioned in talk:

The State of Women in Tech 2020 (DreamHost)

Connect with me!

This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Oldest comments (86)

Bryant Richards • Jul 23 '20

Why you do something is so important. If you don't have a reason why you are doing something you will loose motivation real fast.

Alex Morton • Jul 24 '20

100%! It's taken me a while to learn this, but since I have, I don't think I can go back to doing anything 'just because!'

Crystal • Jul 23 '20

I'm interested in what resources you used to learn to code? :) What a cool story!

Emmy | Pixi • Jul 23 '20

Would love to hear about this too! It's always cool to see the differences in what resources work best for others.

Alex Morton • Jul 24 '20

Hi Crystal and Emily!

Yes! Of course! So when I was first, first, first starting out, I relied on Codecademy to really get some hand-holding of the basics. This is when I was learning how to build static sites with HTML and CSS.

I think I joined the Pro membership when there was a really good deal, so I used that for a good amount of time (less than a year though because I remember kind of moving on from there).

Then I just started to build my own projects. If I had an idea, I coded it! You can see a few of my projects over on my portfolio if you want > alexlsalt.github.io

After that, it was mainly JavaScript (and it still has been for me). So that includes building the customary projects (i.e. the to-do list/shopping list, etc)

I joined a hackathon a few months ago which really got me out of my comfort zone and I really learned a ton! (Wasn't always comfortable, but it was so worth it in the end.)

I've also been getting a lot of value out of Udemy courses (especially when they're on sale!) - in JavaScript, especially. Just kind of learning all that I can and then implementing it with projects as I go.

The thing with online courses, though, is that I have a rule: Only ONE course at a time. I can't buy any courses if I haven't finished my current course.

Hope that sheds a bit of light!