Starting Fresh as a Web Developer!
Everyone has different eras of their lives. You usually step into a new stage when something drastic happens like getting married or moving across the country. For me, it was starting my journey to becoming a Web Developer. Now if it sounds like I’ve been on this journey for awhile, I am only on my third week. But I can say it has been an eventful three weeks.
How I started this journey was losing my job at a Title Insurance Company. I was laid off, and for awhile I didn’t know what I was going to do. At first, I was applying for several jobs that related to the field I was in. But after awhile, I noticed that all the positions I was qualified for were either entry level or something barely above that. I felt like the past 4 years of my life had been a waste because I was just hopping between careers, not sticking with anything.
Well about a month after being unemployed, a couple family members and friends started talking about web development. At first I wasn’t interested. My best friend is a developer and I have never shown any liking to it. But after enough people were telling me I should try it out, I gave it a shot. My friend bought me a course on Udemy called “The Web Developer Bootcamp 2022”, and this was the start of my road to becoming a Web Developer.
HTML and CSS: The Fun Times
The first thing the instructor Colt Steele teaches you is HTML and CSS. HTML was super easy to grasp and only took me two days to get through. I had the basics down and could create a whole Wikipedia page without styling it. It obviously would look terrible but I knew how to add markup to some text that was given to me.
That is when I started to learn CSS. Everything about CSS intrigued me. I guess I never thought about the fact that the styling of a website comes from lines of code. I learned about things like selectors, the Box Model, and Flexbox. At this point, I really wanted to create a whole entire website that was just HTML and CSS. But I told myself I would finish learning CSS before I gave it a try.
The final section of CSS was learning Bootstrap. Colt wanted us to have a basic understanding of how to use a framework for CSS, and let us know that it just makes designing your website a bit easier. I don’t know why but I did not like anything about Bootstrap. I just felt like the whole section was about taking shortcuts. Colt would show us how to add a premade button to our page, but I just wanted to know how they made the button. I understand that learning a framework is important for the future, but I just wanted to practice the fundamentals of CSS.
After that final section, I booted up a new file and started to code. I didn’t know what to build, I mainly just wanted to start throwing some code in the editor and just test some things. That is when I got to revisit flexbox. This is the first time I figured out the sad reality of coding. That sad reality is, if you think you get a topic and its easy because you watched someone do it, that does not mean it will be easy when you do it on your own. I felt like I didn’t retain anything because I absolutely could not do it.
Roadblocks: What I Learned From Them
I had hit my first roadblock. I went through the entire CSS course and felt like I couldn’t build anything with it. I started to wonder if I had done the whole thing wrong, or if I was just a bad learner. So what did I do? I turned to Youtube and other resources where I could find some answers on why I could not do what I just learned.
After a bit of research, I found out this happens to almost everyone that learns coding. We watch our courses and we code along with the instructor, but as soon as we try to apply it ourselves, we just freeze. This is because we have not put in the practice. I like to think of it in terms of a playing a sport. If someone taught you all of the rules of playing a sport and how to score a goal and how fouls work, that doesn’t mean you are going to walk on that field and kill it. You are going to get destroyed out there. That is because you have not actually done the practice for it.
Once I learned that this happens to everyone, I finally calmed down. I took it one step at a time and just tried to practice the very basics of HTML and CSS. I was no longer trying to build out a whole website when I barely knew how to center a div. After I practiced the basics, I told myself to move on in the course. There is no need to become an expert in HTML and CSS right now. We need to move onto JavaScript and learn the basics so we can apply all of this stuff together.
JavaScript: Can We Be Done With The Hard Stuff
Before going into JavaScript, I knew it was going to be a challenge. The thought of giving rules to a computer and having it act on those rules sounds intimidating. I was immediately thrown off with the console. I had no idea what it was and why we use it. I am still not entirely sure I completely know its purpose. As far as I know, we use it to test our code and see if it is actually running.
Everything was tough but doable. The first thing that I ran into that made me slow down were functions. I really have to stop and think about what our code is doing step by step. If I don’t do that, I get overwhelmed and I have to take a break. I started to learn other things like objects, arrays, loops, statements, and The DOM.
The DOM was definitely cool. I felt like I had learned all this syntax but I didn’t know what to do with it. But once the DOM was introduced, everything started to come together. I learned that you can literally do everything through JavaScript using the DOM. You can make a whole HTML sheet and style it using the DOM. This was the peak of learning JavaScript. On top of that, I got to start my first serious project
My First Project: The Score Keeper
So up until this point, I had done a few projects. But there was nothing good enough to show people. All of them were Code Alongs that I didn’t really do myself, and we were just doing the absolute minimum to get these projects done. But after I had been beaten down by CSS and JavaScript for so long, I needed to prove that I could build something.
That is when Colt Introduced the Score Keeper Code Along. The objective was to build a page that could keep track of a score between two players. You can set a max score, have buttons that add points to the total score, a reset button, and an overall score that changes every time you hit the buttons. I told myself I was not going to watch the Code Along and I was going to build it on my own. When I first saw what it should do, I thought there was no way I could build that. I don’t even know where to start. But I told myself to take it one step at a time, and start with the functionality of the page.
I got to work on the JavaScript aspect of the project. I stayed up all night building this page. I would focus on one little thing like making the total score go up every time I clicked a button, then move on to the next thing. After a couple hours, I was stuck on setting the max score. So I switched over to making the design of the score keeper with CSS. I really impressed myself that night. I gave it cool colors, a cool font, hovering buttons and some other random stuff.
The next morning I was determined to figure out that max score. After about 30 minutes with a fresh mind, I figured it out. Now the page was pretty much done. I still had a few things I wanted to do to the Score Keeper, but I don’t really know how to do them yet. For example, I want to make a “+1” come out of the score button and float up out of it every time you add to the score. I decided to set this project to the side and come back to that more complicated stuff later.
Overall, I was very happy with that project. I did way more for it then Colt asked us to do. He also used Bootstrap to do the design for his project when I only used CSS. This definitely gave me a confidence boost and made me think that I was cut out for this stuff.
My First “Job”: UI Design
I put “job” in quotes because it wasn’t really a job. I had showed my friend (who I talked about way earlier) the Score Keeper I built and he was really impressed. He said that I was ready to do my first real “job” as a web developer. He wanted me to design a sidebar that he had made for a program he built. He was even going to pay me to do it. I was a little scared but I accepted.
I stayed up all night designing that sidebar. But it was no different then when I was doing the design for my Score Keeper. I easily got through it in one night and he loved it. I really appreciated that he let me do that, because it made me feel like I belonged in this field. I told him I would do it for free just because the experience was payment enough, but he insisted he pay. Great friend that guy is!
Async JavaScript: What The Hell is Callback Hell
Async JavaScript has been by far the hardest thing I have had to learn. It takes up one tiny section of the whole course and it took me forever to get through it. When I got half way through the section, I realized I was not ready to step into this section. So I went back and did the stuff that I struggled with. I did a ton of JS exercises I found on the internet that mainly revolved around making functions and loops. Once I felt more comfortable with basic JS, I went back to async.
I understand what Async JavaScript is and why it exists. What I struggled with were the functions we were making to introduce this idea. We took callbacks that were nested in callbacks and turned them into promises. We took these promises and added async functions and the await keyword. I kept having to pause the videos every two seconds so I could wrap my head around “why he put a variable there and not there” and other little things like that.
After two whole days of studying this topic and watching countless Youtube videos to wrap my head around this one little idea, I finally finished it. I don’t have a perfect understanding of all of it, but I don’t think I am supposed to yet. I still haven’t learned about fetching API’s and all the stuff that async JS leads into.
The Future: Hopefully Not Too Bad
I have put a lot of thought into the future of my coding journey. I am constantly looking ahead in the course and seeing what else we are going to be learning. I am only halfway through and it is only going to get harder from here. But I am not only thinking about the future of my course, I am thinking about what comes after it. Will I decide to learn another language? Will I spend all of my time building passion projects? Will I give up entirely and go back to looking for an entry level position?
My plan right now is to try to get the course done. I feel once I have done the course, I will know what I know and what I don’t know. The course will give me all the basics and I will know what I need to practice or where I want to put all my time. I also plan to stick with JavaScript. It seems like a popular language that a lot of people get hired for knowing, so I think I am going to put most of my time into getting good at that.
Now as far as projects go, I am going to try to build as many projects as I can before I feel I am ready to apply for jobs. I want to have a portfolio that is worth showing off. I have done a lot of research into good projects you should try to build, and one project I really look forward to is a social media replica. I want to build a web app that replicates something like twitter, and I want to build it completely on my own. No code along, just MDN and my notes on everything I have learned.
So that has been my coding journey so far. It has been filled with nights where I just want to give up, and nights where I am so proud of the tiny little sidebar I made. This is the new chapter of my life, and I hope one day I can look back at this post and think about how fun it was going through that struggle. If you read this far, I hope you related to some of my experiences and this motivated you to keep going.