My wife thinks it's a nerdy mid-life-crisis but I see huge value in learning to code at this age. After all, I could be off buying expensive motorbikes and growing my hair long instead of reading books and watching tutorials couldn't I?

I've never settled in a job really, not since digital took over the world. You see my trade was print publishing, but that got knocked on the head when iPads and online magazines took over. I've dabbled in a few different roles since. Photography teacher, photographer, graphic designer, domainer, and lately a web designer. All of the roles have been creative in nature but I've never really found home. I've just been treading water to pay the bills and never really learnt enough to give myself any authority in those industries.

I've recently been designing and developing websites using Webflow. It's been a great experience and I've learnt a lot. However, I don't feel at the top of my game by any means.

I love Webflow and all it can do without writing code, but I feel I need to learn how to use HTML, CSS, and eventually JavaScript, correctly in order to create some decent work.

..........time to bring on the code.

I began this journey a few weeks ago, (I'm investing the next 7 months exclusively to learn code) and like most newbies I was super fast out of the blocks, I bought lots of thick books with long words in them, invested in as many courses as I could afford, spent 100's of hours in tutorial hell on YouTube, tried and failed at understanding how to use GitHub at least a few times, subscribed to literally every Tech blogger on the planet, and as a result basically clogged up my entire learning process.

Rule No.1 = Take your time, you cannot learn to code in an afternoon. Rule No.2 = Hide your credit card. Rule No. 3 = Create a rigid learning structure.

Now I have no idea if 7 months is going to be enough time to become dangerous, I've never learnt how to do this stuff before so I'm going in blind. So what I'm doing is watching a full beginners course on each language and then seeing what areas I think will take more, or less, time and building a schedule around that. A birds eye view followed by closer inspection should put me in good stead for a end of the year finish, and hey I may be able to get some React in there too!

I'm not expecting to compete with the "young guns" but as I mentioned on Twitter, I am gonna "put them in the corner and rough them up a bit."

This space is going to be where I'll share what will probably be a hilarious 7 months. I don't take myself too seriously, I'm a cheeky cockney from London with a killer sense of humor and it's with this attitude that I'll be running head on into this brick wall called code. It's gonna be difficult, I'm totally up for the challenge, convinced I'm gonna make it but more importantly, determined to have some huge laughs along the way :)

Next up, what's the plan Stan?

Oh and if anyone has any suggestions/resources for learning then shout them out. I'm low on money but high on time!!!