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Learning to code: My MVP as inspired by PlebDev
7533 sats \ 28 comments \ @BlokchainB 18 Jan devs
zaps forwarded to @bitcoinplebdev (45%)

I been trying to learn to code for about 5 to 6 years now. After doing tutorial after tutorial I still feel like no where closer to developing anything than when I first started in 2019.

For all these years I never knew what I wanted to work on. I have a passion for Bitcoin but trying to jump in head first with protocol development is proving to be very difficult.

So after watching this video I am going to give plebdev’s method a shot. Come up with some lofty goal and then pursue it. It took plebdev almost 9 years to finally build his FB/Twitter application.

So instead let’s see if I can build my MVP which is

Building a native app for stacker newsBuilding a native app for stacker news

I know a developer build the bsats app which was a SN native app for iOS written in JavaScript the developer but stopped maintaining it. So I forked it and will start learning to hopefully bring my MVP to life!

I think if SN had a cool native app more people may be interested in using the site. At the very least I will build something that I wish existed. I’m not a fan of PWAs if I can develop a nice native app for SN the I myself can build features into the app that will make me happy.

I know this might take me 9 years to complete but now when I am learning to code I have an actual project I am working towards that will benefit my as whole.

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999 sats \ 5 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 3 Feb

So I finished lessons 1, 2 and 3. So far so good it’s been pretty straightforward. I made my first repo and pushed it to my GitHub! I feel like I can contribute to any open source project now 😂.

But I have some feedback for you @bitcoinplebdev.

  1. I am using Linux with pop_os. I had a small issue getting the code short cut to work on my machine. Once I tried it my OS gave me the command to run to enable the shortcut to open VS code from terminal. Now it works like a charm.
  2. I think your tipper might have a bug. I tipped you 2k sats and it isn’t showing up. The 1.1k sats I sent cleared
  3. When setting up my GitHub I ran into an issue where I couldn’t push my repo to the website. I kept getting this error failed to push some refs to “link to my repo” after troubleshooting with AI (which didn’t help) I noticed VS code was trying to login to GitHub via the extension. So i logged into my GitHub via VS code and then my push finally worked. I

I know you are doing this for people who have zero experience on software development but small little snags like this can cause people to lose motivation and confidence quickly. I think a brief mention about accessing GitHub via VS code can go a long way in helping people push their first ever repo to git hub.

But overall I am enjoying the course it feels like I’m actually making progress

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20.5k sats \ 4 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 3 Feb

Awesome, thanks for the progress update and feedback! The feeling of stacking repos / commits is one of the coolest things, it's like building a canvas of knowledge and work slowly over years I definitely wanna help every new dev get addicted to that experience.

  1. Yeah code shortcut can be weird on different OS's, mine on mac will just stop working lol
  2. This is when you were sending a zap on the course or lesson through the UI? Can you tell me what browser you were using or if on mobile and how you paid? The zapper app integration has been a bit shaky, I'm gonna be doing my own full e2e implementation of zaps soon.
  3. Yeah I need to like record myself doing this in a lot more detail and on multiple OS's probably. Honestly this process is so confusing and easy to forget I had to watch a tutorial myself before recording that lesson 😂

I appreciate the feedback this is helpful AND encouraging to know people are going through it and finding value! This is just V1 of the starter, I will redo it and improve it at some point soon cause I know how important it is to have an empowering and fun intro for this stuff and these little blockers can be so devastating for that hah

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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 15 Feb

Thanks for meeting with me today and working through this auth problem!! Please don’t doxxx me haha 😆

Hopefully you can have dinner on me tonight @bitcoinplebdev

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49 sats \ 1 reply \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 16 Feb

Dude yeah great to meet, and thank you! I wont dox you don't worry haha

I'm following you on Github now so keep pushing commits and let me know if you get stuck again 🫡

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 16 Feb

🫡

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 3 Feb

Yeah that is true. Self learning alone and hitting a snag you don’t know how to fix cause all kinds of doubt and kills momentum. But soon as you breakthrough you get excited and confidence comes back.

I’ll keep you posted as I keep taking your courses. Thanks for putting this together!

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1021 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB OP 17 Feb

Finished the introduction course on plebdev and I give a

Solid BSolid B

Here are my thoughts: @bitcoinplebdev

  1. Everything was done at rudimentary level. But the JavaScript course is really dense. The difficulty seem to go from elementary school to college calculus.
  2. The slides are a really big help. If you take this course keep the slides handy for quick reference. They will help you reinforce what Austin is teaching
  3. I am glad Austin lead off with git. It feels so exciting to push code from your IDE to your github. You really start to feel like a real programmer.
  4. Austin very accessible . As this course scales and more people take it access to Austin may not be so easy but having someone to instill confidence is a major plus. He was very helpful with a GitHub authentication issue I ran into to.

If the class makes these following improvements I think it can become a A level course:

  1. After each lesson offer a quiz to reinforce what we learn.
  2. Offer a small coding exercise to help people struggle through a problem. If people need help/tutor you can set a base fee for a set amount of time to help those work through the problem set.
  3. The jump to JavaScript is very intimidating. I took a JavaScript course (Wes Bos) back in 2018. I’m pretty sure I forgot 99.99% of it but I was able to recognize what Austin was doing. But if I was never exposed to JavaScript this video would of crushed my confidence. I know this a free course and beggars can’t be choosers but to really make this course entry level the JavaScript lecture could be broken up to make sure the major concepts are captured (like the DOM and event listeners) and coding a few buttons and listeners from a blank page like we did with CSS/HTML would of been really helpful.
  4. The course tracker isn’t working properly. I completed all the lessons yet the site is saying I only completed a few. This needs to be fixed. Seeing that green button of complete makes you feel good! Positive reinforcement !!

So my plan now is to review the slides review the JavaScript course again and then move on the next suggested course in the learning tree.

Thanks for putting together! Excited for what comes next

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555 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 18 Feb

Amazing thank you so much for the thorough feedback!

I agree with you in general about the JavaScript portion. This is a big jump and ideally I would like to do this in more baby steps (probably 3-4 individual lessons). I am planning on updating / improving the starter course soon (this was the first version and I actually filmed it in a single weekend lol) so a lot of little improvements I want to add!

I'm generally not a fan of quiz's (and it's a lot to build into the platform) but a few people have suggested it so far so I'll consider how it could be done easily.

Coding exercises are something that is a little more realistic and doable. There are repo "submissions" built into the platform so I could lean into this more (requiring submission for most lessons) but also embedding a codepen directly into a lesson is possible as well.

The lesson tracking can be a bit fickle still... In general it should trigger a lesson as completed after 80% of the video has been watched but this doesn't always trigger correctly. I think I will add a manual checkbox to allow you to mark it as completed if the auto lesson tracking doesn't work. I know progress is important and I want to make it encouraging and seamless on the platform! Still a ways to go.

Things will keep improving, thank you again for the support and feedback!

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550 sats \ 1 reply \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 19 Jan

Let's go that's awesome to hear! Let me know if I can help you with any questions or bugs during the process!

Everyone is different but from my experience protocol development topics have become easier after learning app development first. It's a great way to get your journey started with a lot of cool potential projects out there to build on Bitcoin/Lightning/Nostr.

I think a native stacker news app is a great idea! If you get stuck with understanding the existing fork you're starting with I would suggest building it from scratch yourself and starting with a basic API integration to just pull in all of the items and make it work read only at first. Not sure what languages you're familiar with but going the Javascript -> React -> React Native route is probably the easiest for making Native apps (in my opinion) but PWA's are awesome as well!

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2100 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 19 Jan

Thanks for the advice! I will be sure to reach out if I need help! I know where to find you.

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121 sats \ 11 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 9 Feb

Currently taking the JavaScript lesson and I am trying to create my own repo and I am running into a bug

When I run git push I get the following message

fatal: The current branch main has no upstream branch. To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

git push —set upstream origin main

When run that command VS code hangs then under a search bar I see Git: https//github.com (Press Enter to confirm or escape to cancel)

When I hit “enter” twice my terminal gives me this error

remote: No anonymous write access. Fatal: authentication failed for “https://my repo location”

I been stuck here for a some time now. I’m on stack overflow and none of their suggestions are working (turn off git terminal Authentication, and the use of personal access tokens)

Any idea what I should do @bitcoinplebdev

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959 sats \ 10 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 10 Feb

This is a super common Git authentication issue! I have to do some googling everytime I go through this process myself, it's kind of annoying...

  1. First, ensure you've configured Git with your GitHub email and username:
git config --global user.name "Your GitHub Username"
git config --global user.email "your@github.email"
  1. Create a personal access token (PAT) on GitHub:

Go to GitHub.com → Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Tokens (classic) Generate new token Select repo scope Copy the generated token

  1. When pushing, use HTTPS with your token:
git remote set-url origin https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME:YOUR_PAT@github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO.git

Finally you can try:

git push -u origin main

If you're still having issues, verify:

  • Your GitHub account has write access to the repository
  • You're using the correct repository URL
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10 sats \ 9 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 10 Feb

Thanks I’ll give this a try. Yeah it is super annoying. I had to stop the course because I couldn’t get my git work. I’ll definitely try this

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79 sats \ 8 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 10 Feb

LMK if this doesn't work! Happy to jump on a call to pair program

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17 sats \ 7 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 12 Feb

Yeah I gave it a shot for about 1 hour and nothing worked. Now I am getting an error that the repository can’t be found after adding my token. I am all the way confused. The first day I pushed to GitHub no problem following your html example but now with the JavaScript nothing is working. Authentication just keeps failing and I can’t push! Very perplexing.

I even tried to start from scratch with a new repo following your slides and still no success

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77 sats \ 6 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 12 Feb

Sorry about the trouble... Wanna jump on call today? I think we can figure this out in a few mins probably

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547 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 12 Feb

Isn't the repository path missing in here?

git remote set-url origin https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME:YOUR_PAT

You only set the username and authentication token, but no path to a repository, so the 404 error @BlokchainB is getting would make sense

edit: oof, our markdown is swallowing some text after @, click here to see the raw text with full instructions

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140 sats \ 4 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 12 Feb

Today wont work for me. Maybe tomorrow or any day over the weekend.

Hey it’s not your fault. I’m just glad you are responding and helping.

Learning to code has been extremely lonely journey for me .

It’s nice to have someone to chat with and talk out the issues. It keeps me motivated and engaged and not pushing this off.

Because when you are learning alone when you hit an issue you say to yourself oh I’ll get to that tomorrow. Then tomorrow become next week and before you know it you quit.

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519 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev fwd 12 Feb

I totally get it, I'm the same way!

Hit me up tomorrow or the day after on Discord or Nostr (we'll get this figured out quick!)

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113 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 12 Feb

deleted my other comment because of formatting issues and my edit timer ran out:

Learning to code has been extremely lonely journey for me .

It’s nice to have someone to chat with and talk out the issues. It keeps me motivated and engaged and not pushing this off.

Joining the plebdevs discord might help you if you haven't already.

btw, I can only cosign what @bitcoinplebdev mentioned here:

This is a super common Git authentication issue! I have to do some googling everytime I go through this process myself, it's kind of annoying...

But I just realized since it's an authentication problem, using SSH instead of HTTP might help (not sure if mentioning SSH will confuse you even more; I hope not).

So instead of https://github.com/ekzyis/repo, I use git@github.com:ekzyis/repo after I added my SSH public key to my Github account (which I only had to do once).

Additionally, I noticed SN swallowed some text in the instructions @bitcoinplebdev gave you, see #884050

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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 12 Feb

deleted by author

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 19 Jan

Really amazing project.

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97 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 19 Jan

That’s awesome. We are rooting for you!

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79 sats \ 0 replies \ @yfaming 19 Jan

Bravo! The Tao Te Ching says, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Go and you'll get there!

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74 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitcoinisawesome 19 Jan

The most important step you can’t take is the next one - Dalinar, Bondsmith

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 11 Aug

Been making progres with this using replit and vibe coding!

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 22 Apr

Hey @bitcoinplebdev I signed up and I am now doing your front end course. I want to report a few bugs

  1. The dev journey graphic isnt accurate. I completed the plebdev starter course and the box isn’t lit up green.
  2. The JavaScript lesson with super only plays audio. No visual is coming in
  3. I was looking for a place to report bugs and issues on the site but I didn’t see it. Maybe you can put a link to the GitHub to allow learners to report bugs.
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