What was your first coding project (no-code counts)?

Gabe Perez
53 replies
What was your first project and how did you get started? Curious how makers get started in their journey and learn the skills they need to create something. Any advice for makers who have an idea but don't know where to start in the building journey?

Replies

Thomas Kimura
Back in the day one of the first big things I made was a custom Tumblr theme. Was able to learn a lot and got featured in the Tumblr theme store
huntFilter
huntFilter
@_tomki that's pretty cool!
Nathan Lively
Phase Invaders! with Microsoft VBA. You know how it is when you don't know what you don't know, right? I wanted to make a game and I had Excel, so I just tried to do it there, not knowing that that was actually more complicated than some other platform. It worked, sort of. Definitely a good learning experience. I'm definitely still an amateur. I finally got started in coding when my technical cofounder quit.
Nick Naumov
I was trying to build a platform for live shows crowdfunding. Image you love some artist, however, they seem to never play a show in your city - you just start a campaign and invite other fans to "buy" a ticket in advance when there're no dates, venue etc. I was a complete beginner so had to learn a lot: coding, analytics, management etc. The thing that really helped me was the university startup accelerator - they forced me to read "Lean startup" and "Mom's test" and that was at some point the most valuable thing to me back there.
Ian
Notion Expert
Notion Expert
My first project is the AI-powered copywriting tool - https://ExtySolutions.com It is made for all the entrepreneurs, marketers and copywriters out there to help write business and marketing copy, brainstorm ideas, and more. Give it a shot!
Eugene Hauptmann
Thanks for the question! @gabe__perez So my first "product" I built was for the medical office of my parents. A simple phonebook application for DOS with fancy windows and tabs. It was my first serious program I wrote with lots of UI back at that time, and lot's of spaghetti code. But hey, it worked, and it was used for couple months until they bought something else from Microsoft. I was around 8 y.o. at that time. My first business was a brick-and-mortar retail shop, that failed hilariously, but tought me lots of invaluable lessons back when I was 15 y.o. Many tries and several years later my first profitable business was in Healthcare where we were doing warehouse automation for a few hospitals (this was a pre-HIPAA era). We were lucky enough to have more senior mentors coaching our team and myself in building business on top of the product after PMF phase. By the way, let me know your opinion on distribution vs PMF question here: https://twitter.com/eugenehp/sta... My advise for makers is to keep trying, build new things, **listen** to your target audience. Build a team, if you can, and have fun!
Hans Husurianto
My first project actually began when I was very young. I had started writing small scripts and programs to get used to what I was actually doing. Fast forward 14-ish years, I have begun working on my actually first project with a business model and product. For those who are newly looking into creating something, I would highly recommend just exploring the area first. Find tutorials on how to create examples that are similar to what you want to make. And keep doing this. If you can't find education through school, education through experience and practice is the next best thing. Also, my favorite motivator is knowing that failing often is better because then you learn more for next time.
huntFilter
huntFilter
@hans_husurianto1 Awesome Hans~ thanks for sharing. Going off tutorials to learn how to create a copy is a great first step, def agree.
Mandeep
Used to make minigames and mods for games. Best advice is just to go out there and start trying to build it. I think trying to get programming books and learn things "the right way" is walking into a dead end. I personally wouldn't have had the motivation to get through those. Just follow lots of broken tutorials, StackOverflows, guides, etc., to build the product you want (provided you're trying to do something 'reasonable' – can be hard to judge this without any programming experience already, but most things are reasonable). You'll learn stuff along the way. Some of it you'll just be pasting and have no clue what it does, but at some point down the road you'll figure that out too. You can do it the book way too. But even if you get through the boredom of learning the theory, I feel like acquiring knowledge can be a bit different to knowing how to apply it. I learned a lot of maths etc from textbooks, and even a lot of structural theory from books, but I feel like I'd have lost the joy of programming if I started out with books, rather than just doing.
Brett B
I built a developer productivity tool. It was a horrible mix of a Perl script glued onto a VB6 GUI. But it was fast, had few competitors and I sold over $100,000 of them. Lessons learnt: code quality makes very little difference as long as your product "does what it says on the tin". Also the best way to learn how to code is to find a project that achieves some objective that is important in your life. For example after being cruelly made redundant I vowed never to be 100% reliant on somebody else for my income.
Junior Owolabi
Management Information System for Hotel Inventory & Logistics, in 2008. It was built using Visual Basic and I think MySQL database. I built it for a school project. You should try React Native or Flutter 2, they are platform independent framework (meaning they can run on Mobile, Tablet/IPad, Desktop and Web, from one codebase), they have huge communities and tutorials. I think Visual Studio Code supports both
Daniel Tuttle
So way back in the 80s, I made a character stat generator for AD&D in BASIC. It wasn't perfect, but I was young and quite proud of it.
Mohammad Shamsuddoha
My first coding project was "Making a website using HTML code".
Simon BRAMI
Recreating the Malloc/Realloc/Free functions in C. Not very funny but super instructive!
Aristomenis Georgiopoulos
My first "serious" coding project was a platform game for mobile. I was using C++ and cocos2dx. My second one was a SEO tool that helped you find keywords based on your competitors. This was developed in C#, html, javascript and microsoft sql. Unfortunately none of these two projects launched. Both remained experiments but helped me learn a lot of stuff. I had though a technical background as I studied informatics. If you have an Idea and don't know where to start my advice is to break it into very small pieces and try to find solutions for each one. Also it is really helpful to share your idea and get help from others. A couple of friends of mine helped me a lot during this process and I am very thankful.
Eivind Håverstad
My coding project was a website in Flash😅
Aaron Tran
My first project was data analysis and modelling using Python - I had taught myself how to code during downtime when working as a management consultant. My advice would be get started now because you just need a few hours a week to develop some potentially life-changing skills. Whether its learning how to code, or via the many great no-code tools out there, it's never been easier for non-technical people to turn ideas into software.
huntFilter
huntFilter
@aaron_tran2 that's a good use of downtown and also inspiring. No-code right now is a brilliant way to get things off the ground.
Kelvin Yong
My first project was to create a registration page for a game server decades ago. Started off with videos on Youtube, forums, and Googling for HTML, CSS, and finally PHP tutorials. It was also then I realised I'd prefer coding than gaming. Especially, learning new languages and then, "wow, it works.".
Sarah Evans
My FIRST project for was for the Illinois State History fair back in (gasp) 1993. I made the Al Capone Quiz game that won state honors on a now defunct software and computer. LOL.
huntFilter
huntFilter
@prsarahevans I kinda want to play this now. How do we find this v i n t a g e tech TT__TT
Sarah Evans
@gabe__perez LOL. I think it's everyone's best interest, that the floppy disk is never seen again. ;)
huntFilter
huntFilter
@prsarahevans DED Going to need one of these