You may have heard this comparison before, at first, I was a little confused by it but when I thought about it in relation to my own experience it made sense 🤔
Just like when learning to code, in cooking you start with the basics.🧑🍳
First, building familiarity with one cuisine (or language), becoming acquainted with the foundations, and slowly earning some confidence.
Now you can take simple ingredients, your tools, and follow a recipe to prepare a meal. This is no different to following getting started instructions with your chosen language/framework and practising with an example site, or app 👍
Of course, given a recipe, you can experiment with new dishes – from other cultural cuisines – trying new techniques and learning with each meal.
The fun thing about cooking is that, once you have the basics down, you can start to improvise; taking what you find in the fridge (user requirements), with the concepts that you know (best practices) and still cook (or build) something well 🙌
With each iteration, you improve, expanding your repertoire until you feel confident that you can cook almost anything, given the right recipe, ingredients, and time to learn.
It’s like this with coding. At first, I became familiar, and then confident, with JavaScript. I experimented with various frameworks – Vue, React, Angular – and found that the concepts I’ve internalised, and the best practices I follow allow me to play with these new cuisines and cook a great website 🤸🏼
The ingredients (the tools I have to work with) and recipe (the client’s requirements) may change, however, I’ve grown to be confident in cooking a meal (building a website) that best suits the clients’ tastes.