I started my first real coding project way back in 2002.

Really, I had a few sample projects when I was first learning to code. Those projects helped prepare me to think about the bigger picture, but there is nothing like sinking your teeth into a live business project that has real impact to a business.

And while my coding business turned into a 6-figure a year business, I made a ton of newbie mistakes along the way that held it back in the early years.

In fact, there are 3 critical mistakes I made that I don't want YOU to make with your first (or 5th) coding project. If you can avoid these, you can not only grow better as a coder but grow faster.

One of the first projects I worked on was with a Basketball Magazine company. I was tasked with architecting and developing both the front-end and back-end of an online magazine entirely in ColdFusion and MSSQL (along with HTML, CSS and JavaScript). This provided a complete online magazine with online transactions for purchasing...

I wanted to take you into my home office today and share with you my setup, what I use for coding, what goes into a normal day in the life of a coder. It’s not all that glamorous, but it’s challenging, rewarding and fun.

I’m a Salesforce Technical Architect, which means I strategically plan custom technical projects that help provide business value that will positively impact a businesses bottom line, and I get my hands dirty actually doing the coding work. I work on the Salesforce platform, best CRM there is and the coding language I mainly use is Apex, but I also use Javascript, HTML, CSS and do integration work as well with SOAP and REST APIs.

Computer Setup

For my computer setup I work on a Mac. I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I started out with a PC in my early coding days, but turned Mac early on… and once you turn Mac you never go back. I have two other I think 19” and 21” monitors that I connect to my laptop to provide me with 3 screens...

If you are interested in coding/programming but don’t know where to start, you are not alone. Just a quick google search about getting started programming you will find there are more than 700 programming languages and more created each year. It’s so hard to figure out where to start.

I want to give you a simple easy way to break down how to get started coding right now.

#1 Decide The Platform

Decide what type of media based platform you want to work on (mobile apps, desktop/console apps or cloud-based / web-based).

Are you doing this for more of hobby or are you wanting to position yourself to be marketable for business so that you can make a 6 figure income?

Mobile based platforms - iOS: Objective-C and Swift are the 2 main programming languages used to build iOS apps. Objective C is an older language whereas Swift is a modern, fast, clear and evolving language. Android mainly uses Java.

Desktop/Console apps: Java, C, C++, Swift

Cloud-based / Web-based languages:...