[OGiR]

Glad to see this being said.

This last year I got fed up with mindlessly completing homework and studying for Math and CS in school and started doing what I really want to do in my spare time; building. I decided web development seemed cool and I used to enjoy making silly little web pages a couple decades ago. It seemed natural to me to familiarize myself with html first, so I wrote a page with just html. The next thing for my spare time was a little site using just html and css so I practice and familiarize myself with some css. Then I started playing with js.

I did encounter the types of situations the article is describing constantly, but I was sure of what I was doing and what I wanted to do so I did not let them affect me. I was going to go whatever slow, awkward route toward web development I wanted to take. I knew I could pick up a framework to code an app, but for my own sake, I wanted to write the whole thing in php, including coding basic CRUD functions for my mysql server and basically reinventing MVC for my own project.

Nowadays I am playing with backbone consuming api calls from my restful django server, and it is wonderful and very exciting, but I had to get there on my own terms, and I am glad I did.

My advice to noobs like me is to play with what you understand, and enjoy the journey, without worry about 'doing things right'.

[kazagistar]

It is far easier for the right way to "stick" if you can reference something you did the wrong way beforehand while learning it. Learning Haskell recently has helped me really understand this; finding the right way is difficult and often not entirely intuitive at first, but once you try it out and work through things the hard way, you gain the ability to appreciate what you were missing.