Learning to Learn

One year ago today, I made a commitment to myself to learn to code. Ever since, I've studied for hours on end every single day, without missing a single day. That means I studied on my birthday, on Christmas, on Thanksgiving, on Halloween, and on every other holiday. This has been the most difficult thing I've put my mind to, but I've continued to put one foot in front of another every single day, and that's what it takes. I hear stories about people studying for 8 or 10 hours a day, and I can't imagine they last that long. It's not a sprint; it's a marathon. For me, I'm a year in, but nothing changes, nor will it for a long time to come. This career is one where you never stop learning. It's an ever changing world and I'm still working on getting caught up to the rest of them. Some people have been doing this since they were teenagers and coding is second nature to them by now. That doesn't mean they're continuing to learn, though. I have to advantage of knowing I will continue to learn for the rest of my career and there is no point where I just know everything. I've only learned one major programming language and I definitely don't consider myself a JavaScript master, yet.

I often thing back on how I started this journey. I had been tossing around the idea of learning to code for years, but never knew how to get into it. There were many times where I looked up different coding bootcamps online to try and find something I could afford or get into. The price always scared me away, and I never got further than that. This time last year, I realized I might not have to do that. It started with a short course on Treehouse.com on mySQL. I barely remember what I learned in that course, but I did learn it was possible to get an education for cheap online. I kept looking around after this course, and stumbled upon the Odin Project. This is an open source project that serves as curriculum for learning web development from scratch. I went through the HTML and CSS portions of this course, and thought, hey, I can do this. It was exciting to be able to create a website and get something to actually show up on the screen, and I was enthralled. Then, I got to the JavaScript section. It completely broke my spirit, and I realized I needed to find another way to learn. The Odin Project shows you what you need to learn, but does not hold your hand in the least. I was totally lost, and I couldn't find the answers I needed.

I kept seeing things about this course on Udemy by Colt Steele. It is basically a full walkthrough of web development, from HTML and CSS, through JavaScript, and into NodeJS with MongoDB on the backend. This was exactly what I needed. Before this course, I was having a hard time seeing the full picture and understanding exactly what I needed to learn. After this, I had a roadmap. Right after this course, I was inspired to start this blog. I found a tutorial on Youtube for creating a blog using Vue with NuxtJS using Storyblok as a CMS. On July 16th, I wrote my first entry and haven't missed a day since. Some entries are better than others, but to me it's more important to write something every single day, and continue the repetition. With the blog and #100DaysOfCode, I had a couple of ways to hold myself accountable when things got tough. When I started applying for jobs, I hit those tough spots. I got turned down for job after job because of my lack of experience and got pretty down about it. But, because of these checks I had in place, I continued working every day, and eventually I was able to land a job. I've found a home in the world of React, and I really think I made a good decision getting into it. There are a ton of jobs in this space and it's an exciting community to be a part of. Things are always changing and evolving, and they lead the way when it comes to frameworks/libraries. For a time, I considered going down the Vue road, and I don't think this would have been the worst decision, but the opportunities in React far outweigh those in Vue. Bottom line: I made one of the best decisions I have ever made one year ago today, and I'm excited to see what's next.

Until tomorrow!