Day One
So I decided to start maintaining a few blogs for my New Year’s resolution. Normally I don’t do resolutions each time the year turns around, but with so much going on in my life right now I thought it could be beneficial to me. I created a WordPress blog (http://jamesosteen.com/blog) that I’ll use to blog about more personal things going on in my life and then this Medium blog platform will be used more for tracking my progress as I move through the Web Development training curriculum I arranged for myself. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading over various websites, discussions, blogs, Facebook posts, etc. to develop a list of resources to develop my own curriculum for becoming a Full Stack Web Developer with a heavy focus on the JavaScript MEAN Stack.
A little bit of history about me. In late 2008, I graduated from the University of Advancing Technology with a Bachelors degree in Software Engineering (Web Programming was my Major). Afterwards, I moved back home to Mesquite, Texas (I was attending college in Tempe, Arizona) and took a job at a bookstore I use to work at. They had an opening for an Assistant Manager and I needed a job right away so it seemed like a good fit. One of my career goals was to assist churches in developing better websites and this was a Christian bookstore that worked closely with many local churches so that was another bonus. I did this up until the end of 2012. At this time, my firstborn child came into this world and I decided to stay at home and care for him while trying to work on some freelance projects on the side. My wife was finishing her Masters degree and just started a new teaching position at a new school so this seemed like the best fit for our situation. I was also looking for a change as there was no opportunity to move up or gain anything else from the bookstore position.
Over the next 3 years (2013–2015) I tried to balance being a stay at home dad and a freelance web developer. It was tough. At some point during 2015, I decided that I needed to get back to an actual job. The reasons were numerous, but the main reason was for better and a more stable source of income for my family. Shortly after deciding this we also found out baby #2 was on the way so that was a confirmation for me that it was the right move to make.
I started working through the online curriculum at Free Code Camp and putting together a group on Facebook for the Dallas area. That has been immensely helpful and motivating. As I worked through the curriculum, I found myself drifting to another resource, then another, and another. There are many different resources online that can easily pull you back and forth. There wasn’t one in particular that I liked over the other. Rather there were bits and pieces of one that I liked, then another section of another, then this video in that one….I think you get the idea. So I decided to stop what I was doing and start collecting a large group of training resources on various Web Development topics. Once I had my list, I weeded through it and constructed an outline for me to follow as I moved from one thing to the next. I decided since the New Year was fast approaching, I would use that as my start date and work through my curriculum and use this blog to update my progress as well as keep me accountable.
The main goal in all of this is to become a confident Web Developer in the MEAN Stack and at some point in 2016, go from Freelancer to landing an actual developer job. With all of the background stuff out of the way, let’s move forward to some training material for Day 1!
For the first couple of days, I have some basic algorithm resources that I wanted to knock out. Today, I’ll be using Khan Academy’s Algorithms tutorials as well as Coding Dojo’s Algorithm Training Platform.
Links:
Khan Academy’s Algorithms tutorials — https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms
Coding Dojo’s Algorithm Training Platform — http://algorithm.codingdojo.com/