Some Tips

1# 10,000 HOURS

 Get started. Do not feel bad that you are not an expert programmer yet. In 10,000 hours, you will be. All you need to do is start. Dedicate some time each day or week to checking things off this list. You can take as long as you want or move as fast as you want. If you've decided to become a great programmer, you've already accomplished the hardest part: planting the seed. Now you just have to add time and your skills will blossom. 

#2 DON'T WORRY

Do not be intimated by how much you don't understand. We all know that computers are fundamentally about 1s and 0s, but what the hell does that really mean? It took me a long time to figure it out--it has something to do with voltages and transistors. There are endless topics in computer science and endless terms that you won't understand. But if you stick with it, eventually almost everything will be demystified. So don't waste time or get stressed worrying about what you don't know. It will come, trust me. Remember, every great programmer at one time had NO IDEA what assembly was, or a compiler, or a pointer, or a class, or a closure, or a transistor. Many of them still dont! That's part of the fun of this subject--you'll always be learning.

#3 SILICON VALLEY

Simply by moving to Silicon Valley, you have at least: 10x as many programmers to talk to, 10x as many programming job opportunities, 10x as many programming meetups, and so on. You don't have to do this, but it will make you move much faster.

#4 READ BOOKS

or download eBooks or watch tutorials on YouTube 

#5 OBJECT ORIENTED

This is the "language" the world codes in. Just as businessmen communicate primarily in English, coders communicate primarily in Object Oriented terms. Terms like classes and instances and inheritance. They were completely, completely, completely foreign and scary to me. They'd make me sick to my stomach.

#6 PUBLISH CODE

If you keep a private journal and write the sentence The car green is, you may keep writing that hundreds of times without realizing its bad grammar, until you happen to come upon the correct way of doing things. If you write that in an email, someone will instantly correctly you and you probably won't make the mistake again. You can speed up your learning 1-2 orders of magnitude by sharing your work with others. Its embarrassing to make mistakes, but the only way to become great is to trudge through foul smelling swamp of embarrassment.

#7 USE GITHUB

Every other developer uses it, and you can't become a great programmer by coding alone, so you'll have to start using it. Luckily, you're learning during an ideal time. Github has made learning and using version control much easier. Also, Dropbox is a great tool that your mom could use and yet that has some of the powerful sharing and version control features of something like git.

#8 LEARN LINUX

The command line is not user friendly. It will take time and lots of repetition to learn it. But again, its what the world uses, you'll need at least a basic grasp of the command line to become a great programmer. When you get good at the command line, its actually pretty damn cool. Youll appreciate how much of what we depend on today was written over the course of a few decades. And youll be amazed at how much you can do from the command line. If you use Windows, get CYGWIN! I just found it a few months ago, and it is much easier and faster than running virtualized Linux instances.

#9 TOUCH TYPING   

                                                           That's it, go get started!