How to start to write code (for QA Engineers)?

Photo by Safar Safarov on Unsplash

If you are a Junior QA, you probably dream about stopping doing things manually and start to automate something. But I know that you are lost and don’t know what to do. Most of the Internet resources just make your frustration worse.

I know, I was in your shoes. I didn’t know where to start, which language to choose, which course to take or book to read, where to practice, and 100500 questions like that.

I remember how I was lost choosing Ruby as my first language. For about 6 months I struggled to understand programming on Ruby and what’s going on at all, then I tried JavaScript. And it was a little bit better but still, I didn’t get a lot of stuff. Then at my work, I had to read Python code. It was hard, really hard. I just googled every method, tried to understand…

After that, I decided to take a Python course on Code Academy website. They have really good python basics courses. So I highly recommend it.

At that time I felt more confident but I wanted to go deeper and wider. I wanted to write python scripts to make my QA life easier. And I bumped into a really cool book — Automate the boring stuff with python. After I went through it and did all exercises and projects. I got some understanding of what Python is capable of and how things work together. Since that, I stopped to panic when thinking about coding. I wish someone had recommended this book to me at the very beginning of my programming path.

I got a new job and started to write on Python a lot of tests, but still, I was looking for more practice outside work. I tried a lot of platforms and the best for me is Hacker Rank. If you feel like you miss something or you are not confident in your code learning path, go there and practice, practice, practice! In the end, you will reach your goal!⠀

In our century of limitless information, it’s easy to get lost. I was lost, I chose not the best language for beginners, I chose the wrong books, I chose not good courses. I made not the best choices and it cost me time. And today I’m happy that I have the opportunity to share with you my experience and best learning resources.