Want to feel good about yourself? Try something that you found difficult a year or two ago. That’s what I did today.

Sometimes I get down on myself because I still consider myself a beginner. I’m like a professional beginner coder, if there ever was such a thing. Even though I have been coding for awhile, I still gravitate toward beginner-level tutorials.

When I was spending a ton of time learning to code a couple years ago I found some videos on YouTube that I liked called coding train. I remember one of the tutorials I tried was for coding a “snake” game. I remember being so confused and getting so caught up on how everything was working that it took me forever to get started and then when I did finally start, I gave up because I couldn’t get the snake to even appear on the screen and I couldn’t keep up with the instructor.

Well, I tried the snake tutorial again yesterday and guess what? I still can’t keep up with the instructor (thank you, pause button) but at least I get it now!! I made the snake happen and I got it to move around when I pressed buttons. It was freakin sweet, you should’ve seen me. I’m getting better!!

p5.js

I need to remember p5.js when I’m looking for a lightweight coding option. Honestly that’s why I made this a blog post- just so I don’t forget about it. P5.js is a JavaScript library by Lauren McCarthy . It’s what was used to make the snake game I was just talking about. It’s well documented, easy to understand, and the best part about it is that you can code right in the web browser! I love when things are easy and after spending time following other tutorials I can definitely say p5.js makes things fucking easy.

While I’m revisiting coding train I decided to check out his series of introductory coding videos . These are meant for total beginners. Now that I know a little about programming it’s actually super helpful to watch through these and gain some new understanding of topics I’ve covered elsewhere. He does a good job! The videos use none other than p5.js so I can see myself making this my flavor of choice for the time being.