It’s midnight. You’re huddled in the restricted section of the library, eyes glued to powerful tomes—Creating Killer Websites! Resilient Web Design! The Pragmatic Programmer! You get a missive from your co-conspirators in the Late Night Code Club… another night of adventurous learning is about to begin.

🕯👩‍💻✨
Welcome to the Late Night Code Club!

Bring your candles and mechanical keyboards a little closer… we’re here to talk about the ✨forbidden knowledge ✨ hidden beneath the endless tutorials and Twitter threads—to reveal the arcane secrets necessary to learn how to write code.

This newsletter is a place for camaraderie for people who are learning how to write code, and those who write code as a creative practice. You won’t find many of the resources typically made for learning programming—technical tutorials, documentation, and demos. There are plenty of those everywhere you look. Instead you’ll find encouragement, new perspectives, and secret keys to understanding that help you find the motivation and mindset to fill in the gaps between the tutorials. These are posts for those moments when you might feel discouraged, overwhelmed, or just plain frustrated.

I believe writing code is one of the greatest creative skills you can practice, unlocking the power to create anything you dream. But we all know it’s not an easy learning curve. The hardest part is getting started—the world of code is difficult to access without a gentle guide. Therefore, many of these posts are for complete beginners, showing important paths and handing over the keys to the Gateway of Coding so that learning can begin in earnest. The next hardest part is getting out of the Pit of Tutorials and Videos—how to go from initial understanding to true fluency and creativity with code. These posts are for the eager authors who want to feel more confident writing code for their careers or creative work, and are on their way to becoming more experienced engineers.

“That sounds great!” you might say, “but who the heck are you, and why are you standing in the shadows?!” Allow me to flourilously reveal my identity…

Your host, Kevin McGillivray, also known as @kev_mcg in the overweb

Ahoy! It is I, Kevin McGillivray. I am the writer of this newsletter and jaunty host of the Late Night Code Club. I’ve been a web developer and software engineer for over ten years, and along the way I’ve helped dozens of people as they deepened their knowledge and skill in programming, as a mentor for coding courses, a senior engineer, and an engineering manager. I believe creativity is a skill and that writing code is one of the most fun ways to not only practice creativity but also broaden the range of possibilities for what you can make.

Having been through the journey myself and helping others along the way, I know how frustrating it can be to learn how to code—countless hours looking for the right resources, then countless more getting stuck before you even begin, and then getting stuck again when you finally make a slight step forward. This newsletter is my way of sharing key perspectives and concepts that are usually skipped over in tutorials or are difficult to put into words, but are essential to gaining confidence and fluency.

I’m grateful you’re here today, and I hope you’ll join the club and come back again.

Joining the Club

It’s free to subscribe to the newsletter for email updates, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribers with a free membership will receive all posts. This is an ad-free space, and if you find value in these posts, there is a paid subscription available to support my time and resources needed for writing. I’m also developing ideas for paid membership benefits in the future. This is all in the early draft stages, so I’m excited to figure it out together, and I’m grateful for your support.