Strategic change
I've absolutely loved Frontend Masters since I started working through their curriculum a couple of weeks ago. They have some of the best instructors in the game, with unique teaching styles to mix it up. Recently, I began Kyle Simpson's "Deep JavaScript Foundations" and have been completely befuddled, but I've stuck with it. While I do feel the material has gotten a bit easier to understand as I've progressed through the course, I've ended up with a feeling of ineptitude that's been hard to shake. I was told by someone I consider to be a mentor that I should stay the course and get what I can from it, but at this point I'm questioning what I'm actually getting from it. The problem lies within the exercises at the end of each section; I've gotten to these exercises and realized I stand no chance at all of actually being able to complete them. Most of them, all I can do is stare blankly with a feeling of panic rising from the pit of my stomach. This has led to some introspection on my current path.
Will Sentance made it clear to me in "JavaScript: The Hard Parts," there are two distinct types of learning: active and passive. Watching videos all day will only get you so far, eventually you have to bridge the gap and actually code. But how do you do that if you don't understand what it is you're supposed to be doing? I've consumed countless hours of curriculum from many sources and feel like my knowledge base is pretty strong at this point, but when I go to write code, there's still something missing there. So, I've decided to try a different approach, one that I actually started a long time ago and then abandoned for Colt Steele's "Web Development Bootcamp," and that is FreeCodeCamp. FreeCodeCamp's curriculum is completely interactive; they give you some information, and you have to solve a problem before moving on to the next bit of information.
They have 6 distinct sections, all spanning 300 hours each of curriculum, plus countless hours of coding interview practice problems at the end. The first section is their Responsive Web Design Certification, which I've decided to skip for now since my immediate mountain is JavaScript. I had actually completed quite a few of these challenges a while back, but I've decided to start all over and have been grinding the evening away with some fairly simple challenges to review the basic concepts such as types, functions, arrays, and objects. So far, it's been pretty smooth, but hasn't really challenged me like I would like it to. I suspect as I get into the more advanced problem sets I should see a huge difference. In fact, when I first thought about doing this earlier today, I did a few problems from where I left off in the ES6 section, and they were pretty challenging. I think this is going to be exactly what I need to feel more comfortable actually coding in JavaScript, but if I find that I'm not getting what I need to from it, I can always walk away and explore other options. At this time, I think this is the best thing for me to keep moving forward and growing my knowledge base.
Until tomorrow!
