Stuck?

Need Help Coding?

One of the problems with the self-taught coding route is when you get stuck there’s no one to help you. You are not in a university so you can’t ask you lecturer or classmates, and you don’t have an employer so there’s no work place team members you can question.

Google is your friend in this situation and is all you need for low level, beginner coding issues. Don’t know how to arrange a for loop inside another for loop? Search engines will have hundreds of articles describing the whole process in depth.

Youtube is also useful for quick tutorials on beginner issues as well. Production quality between videos varies greatly but for common errors beginners face and general coding concepts, there is a lot of material.

Once you get past the basic stuff and move on to creating your own applications or scripts then you quickly discover not everything is going to be solved using Google and Youtube. You just can’t seem to find straight forward answers to what you want to do.

StackOverflow will become your favourite website. Post a question and receive answers from other more experienced developers. Being in Australia, this will often mean waiting until the following day to get a rely as everyone in America, Europe, India etc is asleep when you are awake. StackOverflow is great at providing you with direction, and corrective critique as well as just answers, you may be approaching a problem using the wrong framework or methodology. Front end frameworks can also be simulated using online IDEs like StackBlitz, Replit or Codepen allow you to post a “working” online model of your problem and others can fork it and solve the issue for you.

Forums are also another good place to go for information and to ask for help. Reddit has many coding subreddits where you can post questions, but redditors are less likely to give you working code samples compared to StackOverflow posts. There are also plenty of other online forums out there but social media has killed a lot of them off.

ChatGPT is a new avenue to ask for help as well. It s getting better everyday and can be pretty spot on for beginner coding questions.