Exploring the depths of JavaScript

I'm about 2 hours into Will Sentance's "JavaScript: The Hard Parts" on Frontend Masters, and I'm blown away so far. His style is captivating and hilarious; he asks questions of the class constantly and has a great delivery. His main strength that I can see is taking a concept and exploring it fully, with constant repetition of "posh" keywords. One of the premises of this course is making the student better at explaining their code fully, and I can say already I could articulate my code much more clearly than I could before. He has 4 courses on Frontend Masters, and I can't wait to take his others. I feel like I'm going to walk away much better off than when I started, for sure.

Yesterday, I took a course on SEO; it was taught fantastically by Mike North, but I realized I had very little interest in this topic, and it's not one that's integral to the path I'm currently taking. If I were going to go down the freelance path, this would be a skill I would really want to hone, as it's really important to the marketing side of web development. However, I want to work for a company building their apps or websites, and likely they would have someone that specifically focuses on SEO work, or a marketing department that takes care of it. I did find that this topic goes much deeper than I thought; you can really get technical in this area and end up doing a lot of coding, integrating ads into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Google. I still learned quite a lot about the topic, but it just didn't captivate me like the rest of web development has.

Overall, Frontend Masters is killing it, in my opinion. I haven't taken a course that I didn't like yet, although some interested me more than others. Every single instructor I've taken courses from so far has been so skilled in their delivery that it's blown me away. Focusing on JavaScript has been a really good move for me, instead of focusing on React or any of the other shiny, new toys. I'll be back to go deeper on React, and soon, but I'll be back with a much better understanding of what I'm actually doing. I've been able to follow along just fine with the instructors for the courses I took before Frontend Masters, but I realize now this was the easy path of learning. Now, I'm beginning down the hard route, meaning I'll spend a lot of time scratching my head and being confused. This, I found, is the only way to grow my skills in a hurry. It may seem like I'm covering less ground, but I'm learning more than I was on a daily basis. After I have a firm grasp on the concepts on JavaScript, I need to start challenging myself with difficult problems to solve. This will be the really hard path, but I'm on my way to get to this path, for sure.

Until tomorrow!