3 biggest mistakes beginners make

3 biggest mistakes beginners make

3 mistakes beginners make that they don't know and regret later

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3 min read

3 biggest mistakes beginners make

As a beginner, you don't know what's correct and what's wrong and you end up making mistakes early in your coding career that you regret later (around 1-3 years later). So to avoid mistakes you need to know them first, here are the top 3 mistakes beginners make.


1. Hopping on interesting parts vs learning the fundamentals


This mistake is the most common mistake of all and it's not language-specific, skipping fundamentals of javascript to learn react/vue/svelte/angular or skipping CSS fundamentals and learning bootstrap/tailwind first, other examples can be Django/flask before understanding python or learning any framework or library before language fundamentals. This mistake is alone is going to cost you a lot of time and sanity. Many people do not realize this mistake but when they go to an interview or create a project they will know that you are having holes in your knowledge.


2. Jumping and skipping lectures


Jumping and skipping lectures is not wrong, it's actually helpful to gain the information you need and to leave some non-relevant parts but when you are just starting out you don't know what's important and what's not so you tend to skip the fundamentals or the difficult parts of the lecture or skip the videos. This may not harm you during the time but when you will advance your skills, you will find some parts unclear and then you will need to repair your broken castle. A better way is to watch the lecture at a faster playback speed if you know the topic, or you are having no problem understanding the lecture.


3. Not to take the time to understand


After coding for some time you start experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect and you find that your knowledge is very limited and there is a vast ocean ahead of you. To cope with it you didn't take the time to understand the lectures or videos to just complete the courses to tell yourself or your friends that you know a certain technology. This will be more detrimental to your career than the other two combined. When you will create your projects or apply to a company, you will find that you don't know lots of things mostly the things you left unclear and this will force you to rebuild the whole castle. So to prevent it take the time to understand or write notes, summarise topics etc. If you want to know more about remembering the stuff you learned here is a link to an article you will love:
How to remember everything from coding tutorials



We are done now, just one thing to keep in mind that the goal of this article is not to point out that you are the only one that makes mistakes but rather to avoid these mistakes as early in your career. I hope you will avoid these mistakes from now on and have a great day.