Backstory
One day, browsing the web, I stumbled upon a website that looked hideous.
The colours, the pictures, the icons, it was barely bearable.
On top of that, the website was not responsive (which means that the website doesn't respond well to different screen sizes).
From that point, I started noticing more and more “issues” across the different websites I visited. And it annoyed me more and more.
Then I decided, I’m gonna learn how to build websites that are better than this, and the first out of many thousands of Google searches got typed out: “How do you build a website”.
No coding tools
I stumbled across WordPress and started setting up my first website, using a free theme. (I basically took a template without customizable features and filled it with my content).
Not long after that, I started using a plugin called “Elementor”, and at first glance, it was amazing!
The concept of Elementor is to drag and drop different elements onto a blank canvas to build your website.
A whole new world opened up for someone (me) who didn’t know anything about code.
After messing around with different templates and creating my own “themes”, I started experimenting with plugins and made fully functional websites where I could receive emails and appointments.
How it continued…
I soon realized that I wanted to continue learning about web development and I started gathering information on how to build websites by writing HTML and CSS.
This was a lot harder, with so many new technical terms and things to take into consideration, and a code editor?!
I got VS Code installed and started Googleing and watching many hours worth of tutorials on Youtube to get an understanding of how things worked.
After a couple of days, I had my first “real” website completed.
It was a super simple one-page website that just displayed different elements with clean styles through CSS.
After doing a couple of courses and spending a fair amount of time diving deep into everything, I realized it was time to move on to Javascript.
This felt intimidating, mainly because it was so new.
But things worked out well, I started with the basics and tried to understand different concepts, for example:
- Strings
- Booleans
- Arrays
- Objects
- Null
- Undefined
At first, it felt very overwhelming, but thanks to some amazing people and their helpful content & explanations, things became more and more understandable.
Time to learn a framework
After spending a couple of months trying to understand the basics of Javascript, I wanted to get into learning a framework.
Then the big question was - What framework should I learn?
Let me tell you, I found this tough, but at last, I decided to go with React.
One of the reasons being a course with the same teacher who taught me some of my HTML/CSS and Javascript skills.
Now programming felt even more exciting and it felt so huge, going from knowing nothing at all about code, to start learning a framework!
This had been a milestone and suddenly I was there.
Now I’ve been using React since march this year and I learn something new every day, and I’m getting more and more sure about the idea of working full time with programming.
I’ve also tried out Vue to get the feel of it and the same thing goes there, it’s amazing!
Things that helped me
If you’ve come this far, I’d first like to thank you.
Secondly, I’d like to share some of the things that keep me going, which hopefully can help you to start or to continue:
- When I started, I had very limited time to do these things.
I had (and wanted) to prioritize programming instead of playing video games and such.
I started waking up earlier to be “fresh” for learning new things, and I am happy I did. - Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand all the concepts, it takes time and practice. Even if you’re following a course, don’t blame yourself for not understanding some of the challenges. It happens, and it’s normal.
(It took me quite a while to understand flexbox) - Ignore the answers of people who don’t want you to succeed.
This applies in all areas of life, and the same goes for coding.
If someone on Stackoverflow tells you something like “You will never be a good programmer”, ignore him/her. - Master the way of Googleing. We (or most of us at least) can’t keep everything in our heads, and as you search for more and more you will find the best ways to find answers.
Googleing is an art itself, and it takes practice to master. - Another great thing to do is to bookmark pages with information regarding different topics. Some examples of what I’ve bookmarked myself includes MUI, Dave Ceddia, Mozilla for developers.
Starting to bookmark pages will help you remember where to look for answers and it will help you increase your pace of learning. - Taking notes is another thing that really helped me and just writing down keywords made many concepts easier to grasp.
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed the reading and/or learnt something.
Take care & stay safe, and remember that you can do it if you put the time in!
