Building Things

When I left off yesterday, I was about a month and some change into my journey of learning to code. Things were moving along, and I was, slowly but surely, learning to code. At the beginning of July, I finished my first major course, covering the ins and outs of web development, from the frontend all the way through to the backend with database management. It was a shallow entry, but I got a great understanding of the world of web development and everything there was out there. I felt overwhelmed, to be honest. There was so much I thought I needed to learn, and I wanted to learn it all. I think this is a fairly common feeling for people just starting out; you get introduced to this massive world and you feel like everyone knows all of this. In reality, most developers will focus on one small corner of this world and spend their entire careers in this space. But, at the time, I thought I needed to know it all. After the course, I didn't know exactly where to go. I still thought I could learn this stuff for free, and I thought there was enough information out there on Youtube to keep me occupied for a while. I found a ton of project tutorials to follow, and I got to work.

I remember some of my first few projects; I used frameworks that I had absolutely no information on, like Vue and React. Looking back, I don't think this was the best use of my time, although it wasn't a complete waste of time either. I learned a lot about how to create a project, use Github, and deploy these projects using Netlify. Without the time I spent here, I think it would have taken a lot longer to figure this stuff out. Over the first couple weeks of July, my thoughts turned to building my brand to get myself out in front of some potential employers. By my estimation, it was important for me to have a portfolio, some projects under my belt, and a blog. I also thought I would need to ramp up my LinkedIn profile and maybe get myself out there on Twitter somehow. I can't remember which came first, but I know that I wrote and published my first blog article on July 16th of 2019. I spent a long time trying to find a blog page project to follow along with, and I finally found one by Maximilian Schwarzmuller. This project used Vue with Nuxt and Storyblok as a headless CMS. Again, at this point, I didn't know anything about any of this, but I knew I could follow along. What was only about an hour or two long tutorial took me several days to complete, but I got it up and running. I remember struggling with deployment, but I was finally able to figure it out. Since that day, I haven't skipped a single day of documenting my journey, and I still feel strongly that this was an excellent decision.

Around that same time, I followed another tutorial to build a portfolio using React. Looking back on that version of my portfolio, it's embarrassing, but at least it gave me something to display my skills and the few projects I had built at that point. I suppose I will look back soon at my current portfolio and think the same thing, in fact I kind of already am. Regardless, I got this deployed, and I was halfway there in building my presence. With LinkedIn, I started following anyone who was a software developer and sending them a message introducing myself. I'm up to nearly 4000 connections now, though I don't know how useful this really has been. Shortly after starting my blog, I decided I wanted to give #100DaysOfCode a try on Twitter, which I think was a great decision. Just like my blog, it's given me an extra layer of motivation and helped to keep me on track on the days where I didn't feel much like coding. I haven't missed a day of this challenge yet, and I'm now on my 4th round of 100 days, building my Twitter followers up to about 2000. I was starting to feel like I wasn't really learning much by doing the Youtube tutorials, so I looked back to Udemy to see what I could take. I really wanted to learn React, so I said, why not? I loved Colt Steele's course on web development, and I found he had one on React. This was a perfect introduction to the framework, and just like his other course, I feel like it trampolined me into where I am today. In the next installment, I'll talk about some of the other Udemy courses I took and then my foray into Frontend Masters.

Until tomorrow!