Starting about 2 weeks ago on May 11th, 2019, I have AGAIN started my self-taught web development journey….
My plan right now is to write weekly medium posts going forward to keep myself accountable as well as to keep a journal log of my progress and developments. Whether it would be myself or someone else looking at these posts in the future, I hope it provides value and insight to whoever is reading. I hope to look at these posts in the future to see how far I have come in this journey.
I am going to talk about how I came to start this journey. It has been a little less than 2 years since I graduated from University of Waterloo in Chemical Engineering. From then on, I started my first full time job at OpenText as a Renewals Specialist and worked there for about 1.5 years before I started a new job at Dundas Data Visualization as a Customer Renewals Specialist once again. Currently, I am working this job in hopes of becoming a web developer or a full stack developer in the near future.
In 2016, during my last year of University, I did use Codeacademy for a little while in hopes of starting to learn more about web development but I ended up scraping my progress because I was too “busy” with life. Again at the start of 2018, while working at my full time job, I decided I wanted to change my career to becoming a front-end developer. I was not happy at all with my current job and I also did not want to work as a chemical engineer, essentially, I was stuck. After solid few months of progress, again I sort of stopped self learning. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and few frameworks using Udemy’s Colt Steeles Bootcamp however I did not get far as I stopped taking this course due to my so called “busy schedule”.
Fast forward to now, I am still very unhappy with where my career is going and am afraid where I will end up in few years if I don’t act now. I have waited too long to go after what I want, I have stopped and doubted myself too many times. This will change now. I hope these posts will keep me accountable and will help document my journey.
For the first 2 weeks, I have completed FreeCodeCamp’s basic HTML and CSS and have completed 2 minor projects on their website. It was not very hard however I feel like I need to apply the fundamentals and the knowledge into projects that I will actually apply. My goal is to dive in and work on projects that I am interested in rather than spending months to learn the fundamentals and syntax. This way, I feel I will have a better change and opportunity to apply what I learn as well as learning as I go. I believe best practice is to run into problems myself and solving them myself.
I will begin to learn the basics of Javascript this week. Will keep you posted!
