Up and Running with a Dingus

Well, it took me 3 days to put this simple blog together, with a lot of evil thoughts about doing things to my computer, but it is up and running! This blog was created on the Vue framework with NuxtJS and Storyblok. While this project was well beyond my current skill level and I relied heavily on a tutorial, I wanted to do something that was going to push me beyond my limit. I wanted to get stuck and have to google the answers and learn more and more about these tools and technologies. The feeling of seeing it live after deployment through GitHub pages was one that we are familiar with, when you finally succeed in something after much consternation.

I started coding on May 26th, 2019, so that makes this day 52 of my coding adventure. I first began with The Odin Project, an open-source online curriculum that covers full-stack development, now with paths that focus either on NodeJS or Ruby. The Odin Project does not hold your hand at all. They point you in the direction of the answer and tell you to figure it out, stupid. Which I thought was awesome until it wasn't. I got stuck a few too many times and had to move on before I lost my momentum, but not before I set up my coding environment with Ubuntu and vsCode. I was also able to get started with GitHub from day 1, so I have a pretty decent understanding of it at this point.

From there, I met with a web developer in my area that pointed me towards some good resources. He turned me onto Pluralsight, so I started consuming as many instructional videos as I could handle. This format of learning was much more conducive for me than reading documentation straight up. It allowed me the chance to take notes and code along to create some great starter projects with the aid of a professional.

Since then, I've found some great courses on Udemy that have really moved that bar forward for me. Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp was excellent and broached literally dozens of topics and technologies. I'm currently in the middle of his Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp, which is proving to be just as useful.

My plan for this blog is to track my daily progress, stating what it was that I worked on, where I may have gotten stuck, what topics am I learning or exploring, what technologies I'm using on my to becoming a professional web developer. Truly, the end goal is to gain entry into this field, transferring from my current position.

Today, I've spent the morning hours completing the backend setup to this blog, which proved to be much more difficult than I thought it would be. This is my fiance's first day back to work after a year of maternity leave and I'm home with my beautiful daughter, Kaija Grace. While she's awake, we're going to do some playing and eating, and I'll try to get some work done while she randomly hits keys and blows my computer up. While she naps, I plan to hit the books hard with the Udemy AWDB course. Currently, I'm on Section 7: AJAX Part 1: XHR and Fetch, so it looks like I will be learning some about AJAX and Fetch, which is interesting. I may end up exploring some project tutorials on YouTube to find something that I could make and use, like this blog!

Anyways, thanks for joining on my journey in becoming a professional web developer!