For years I’ve wanted to try my hand at coding and making things but have always struggled to get started from 0.
How would you recommend starting to learn today with all the new tools and things we have available.
For example, I just built this page with cursor in one day: https://convertdrop.com/
When I was learning how to make a web app, I understood what was happening, but it didn't really click why I was doing it this way.
For example, you might learn the history of punch cards, tele-typewriters (this era of coding is downright awesome, the programmer had to maintain so much in their head), terminal emulators, etc and then build yourself some kind of CLI which does something silly like get the current weather from a free API.
Or, if you want to learn how to make a web app, learn how people initially sent HTML from the server, then there was a bunch of jQuery stuff, now it makes sense why we have these SPA frameworks...
You'll have to decide what kind of project you want to learn and some source which tells the history, but pick a project and then just get into a playful state with it for a week or so. Then decide what to do next.
After you make a website, maybe you'll want to learn how all of the networking happens underneath. The networking stuff is foundational knowledge that'll never expire. All the layers that make it all work are quite impressive.