How long does it take to learn to code is the number one question I get asked when people hear I am a self-taught software developer, I always give the same answer: 9 months.
This is 9 months of decent daily effort at about 2-3 hours most days. If your schedule means you can’t make that work then aim for a little bit every day. The daily consistency is more important than the raw amount.
The truth is that learning to code is a unique journey for everyone, it's not simply learning the syntax and knowing how to "speak" a programming language. It's a way of thinking, that comes very naturally to some and not so naturally to others. Part of learning to code is hooking up that wiring in your brain to think through how to break a problem down into small chunks and how to express those solutions in code.
Also, it takes time to learn something. You can't just force a concept into your brain and "know it", some annoying people can but they are very rare. How many times in school did we cram for a test, pass, and then forget it all a week later? That knowledge wasn't ever really set in our brains, we just held it long enough to repeat it under set conditions.
9 months is a realistic time frame regardless of the field you want to get into, be it app development, backend programming, frontend web development, embedded programming, or even the latest booming industry, data science.
So, how good will you be after 9 months?
You'll be ok, you'll be able to implement any solution in code, you'll still be Googling and searching Stackoverflow a lot but that's fine, I've been doing this for 13 years and I still Google and search Stackoverflow a lot. Your design patterns might be a bit iffy, your tests might be fragile (if you are even writing any) and you'll write some horribly slow spaghetti code at times but all those things will improve with time.
So, if you're sat thinking that learning to code is an impossible mountain that will take years to climb ... stop, pick a highly rated course on Udemy or anything on Freecodecamp.org and just start, do a few hours every day, and in 9 months you will know how to code.
How to get the most from those 9 months is a post for another day!