# Place for total coding beginners to learn how to customise?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/place-for-total-coding-beginners-to-learn-how-to-customise/130555
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [October 9, 2019, 9:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/place-for-total-coding-beginners-to-learn-how-to-customise/130555 "2019-10-09T09:17:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 8

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### Author: ![justin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/justin/32/157614_2.png) [@justin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/justin)
#### Post date: [October 9, 2019, 8:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/place-for-total-coding-beginners-to-learn-how-to-customise/130555/8 "2019-10-09T20:28:00Z")

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Honestly, Discourse is a pretty complex app – more complex than a few written tutorials can teach. I highly recommend getting a solid base of understanding on Rails and Ember.js, then digging through the codebase, tracing codepaths as best as you can (though I will say this is not easy at first). Also be sure to look at plugins to see how they tie into Discourse (as there are good ways and bad ways to do this).

@angus wrote up a fantastic beginners guide on the basic knowledge you’ll need to get started.

> [@Learn how to start building stuff for Discourse if you're newbie (like myself)](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-start-building-stuff-for-discourse-if-youre-newbie-like-myself/45954):
>
> There are a few ‘how to start’ guides for working with Discourse already and a wealth of useful info on meta, but I thought it might help to give an insight to the mental processes of starting from little, if any, prior coding experience to building substantial Discourse plugins. Discourse is written by experienced developers and has a large codebase. This can feel intimidating. This intimidation factor can be a significant barrier for novice developers. This is a kind of ‘psychological primer’…

Of course, a lot of this is going to seem like a foreign language until you start to build and experiment further. I’ve been developing on Discourse for 1.5 years now and am only now feeling like I have any sort of understanding how the app works.

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