A proud accomplishment
Exactly 100 days ago, I started writing my first blog entry, completely unsure of the future. I had no idea if I would make it this far, or even what would become of this blog in general. Would the premise change or would I stick to my original goal of creating a log of my progress? At that point, writing 100 blog entries seemed unfathomable. Hell, writing 3 paragraphs seemed like a difficult task. The stakes I set for myself were pretty high: if I missed one day, would I be able to recover the momentum I had built up? To build long lasting habits, you have to cultivate them constantly, meaning you have to stick to what you set out to do from the start. Missing a day was never an option, and I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did miss a day. Some of my posts were unapologetically terrible, but they kept the train rolling. Others I felt just rolled off the fingertips and were written to my best ability.
100 days ago, I had completed one course on Udemy, Colt Steele's "Web Development Bootcamp," which laid the framework of where my journey has taken me to this point. Now, I have over 350 total hours of coursework completed and have grown so much as a web developer. I've had pitfalls, but some of these were the biggest sources of learning that I've had yet. Learning what didn't work for me or was unprofitable for building knowledge has been even more important than courses like Will Sentance's or Colt Steele's and have saved me countless hours of chasing unattainable achievements. 100 days ago, I knew next to nothing about React, Vue, Node, or about a thousand other tools and technologies that I now have a pretty decent understanding of. I had created a handful of projects, but my Github account didn't even resemble what it does today. I can speculate on where I'll be in another 100 days, but I don't think I could even imagine being as far as I am now 100 days ago.
Today, I finished up Will Sentance's "JavaScript: The Hard Parts of Object Oriented JavaScript," and I think this was the most complex of his courses that I've taken so far. I didn't expect this, as functional JavaScript and asynchronous JavaScript are touted as incredibly complex topics compared to OOP. Will took us through the old ways of creating objects with prototype links and into the new methods. The newer methods abstract away a lot of the stuff going on under the hood and make the code itself look a lot more succinct, but when you really break it down, you can see how much is really happening. I truly understand why everyone calls the "class" keyword syntactical sugar now; instead of manually creating these objects, a lot of things just happen automatically. As Will explains, this is great for us developers until it comes to trying to debug your code. If you don't really know how these things work, you'll never be able to figure out where you went wrong. Luckily, he painstakingly took us through what's going on here, and I think I could explain it if asked in an interview.
Until tomorrow!
