You know that moment when you finally decide you’re going to learn to code? You feel excited, motivated, and ready to dive in. The Community welcomes you with open arms, promising endless opportunities. That’s when the lies start.
The biggest one, the one I heard the most when I was starting out, is that learning to code is easy. Everywhere you look, people tell you that you can learn JavaScript in 30 days, become a full-stack developer in three months, or land a job if you just follow one "ultimate roadmap." They make it sound like coding is just like picking up a new language, something anyone can do effortlessly. Some tutorials even promise that by the end of the course, you'll be building real-world applications like a pro. It sounds great, but here’s the thing—none of it is really true.
Learning to code is not easy. It’s doable, yes, but calling it easy sets beginners up for frustration before they even start. Nobody tells you about the struggle of tutorial hell, where you binge-watch coding courses, follow along perfectly, and then stare blankly at your screen when you try to build something on your own. Nobody tells you how much time you’ll spend searching for solutions to errors that seem to make no sense. Nobody prepares you for imposter syndrome, that creeping feeling that everyone else is learning faster than you and that maybe you’re just not cut out for this.
Then there’s debugging, something you probably didn’t think too much about at first. Writing fresh, clean code feels great, but spending hours trying to figure out why something isn’t working can be soul-crushing. You’ll sit there, staring at an error message, trying every solution you find online, only to realize that the problem was a missing semicolon. Or worse, you’ll fix one bug and create three new ones in the process.
The lies don’t just come from others. We tell them to ourselves too. We convince ourselves that finishing one more tutorial will make us experts. We hold off on building projects because we think we need to learn just one more thing first. We assume that struggling with a concept means we’re not smart enough, not realizing that even experienced developers struggle daily.
The reality is, coding is hard, but it’s not impossible. It takes time to get good, and the only way to truly learn is by building projects, making mistakes, and learning from them. Struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re learning. Every great developer you admire was once a clueless beginner, stuck on the same basic concepts, feeling the same frustrations.
So instead of believing the "it’s easy" lie, it’s better to accept the truth. It will take time. You will get stuck. You will feel frustrated. But if you keep going, if you push through the hard parts and actually build things, you’ll start to see real progress. And when that happens, you'll realize that coding isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the one who refuses to give up.
And if anyone still tries to sell you the idea that you can master coding in a month, just smile, nod, and walk away. They clearly haven’t written enough code to know the truth.