My Most Recent Learning Challenge

My most recent challenge in learning was when i was learning PHP, learning something new on your own is not always easy and PHP was not really easy to learn but i did ,i never thought i would one day be learning PHP or even JavaScript , the reason i started learning PHP on my own was because of a friend of mine who often spoke about PHP , and how it was so interesting what you could do with it,how easy it was to use after learning and practicing it for some time ,i did not believe him because at the time when he was telling about PHP at that time even though i did not know it then i was a person with a fixed mindset i thought due what people always said about java being the best language for any software so i wanted to study java and i also thought web development was so easy mostly because i thought then it was just html and css that there is no way anyone who is a real programmer would be a web developer but my friend showed some of his projects i was blown away i got so excited to learn PHP not knowing what i would be facing in the future, i thought my friend would be there to help but he was not but instead he helped me out by giving me videos on PHP and MySQL because most of time the two go hand in hand , one of the most challenging things about learning a new skill on your own is that sometimes you have no one to encourage you i do not know about everybody else but for me this was it i struggled learning PHP because even though it is an Object Oriented language like java it was still a little bit hard for me to grasp it so i got to that point while learning, a point that some of the most impactful people both living and dead have experienced the point where you start questioning yourself you know like am i even supposed to be a programmer and i was scared because i really wanted to a good programmer and start building cool applications with PHP but i was stuck, normally like i usually do i would just give up and tell myself maybe PHP is not for me i will just try something new but then something happened i think i watched a particular movie i can not remember the particular movie but what i remember was being motivated so i made up my mind that i was going to learn PHP and build my own web application.

Some of the things i did was that i got a small notebook where i wrote down all goals which were to learn PHP , MySQL,HTML, CSS so i could build my own web application , what i now realise is that slowly even though then i did not know it my mindset was changing, i only just got to know about mindsets recently at the boot camp but the truth was even after writing goals down it was still not easy mostly because of myself truth is i always had a hard time concentrating or focusing on my goals so even though i had written down what i wanted to acheive it only got me a little far not as far as i should had been based on the goals i had written down so i tried different things i even googled on how to stay focused but to no avail at a point i got frustrated with myself still i just decided to start thinking and stop complaining so i started to think about myself specifically about things that likely made me easily distracted and the one thing i discovered was the major reason for me not focusing was my environment i was always at home so i was always too comfortable i knew immediately what i had to do , i had to stop staying at home so i did instead i looked for places to go and focus on what i wanted to do and soon as i stopped getting too comfortable i started getting results.

And soon after taking action about being better and not giving up on my goals i completed most of my goals that i set for myself you notice i said most of and the only reason why i did not finish completing or achieving my goals was because just when i wanted to start learning html and css which was the last piece i needed to start creating my application , i heard about Andela and i have not had much time to focus on PHP but i hope i get another chance to go back to it .This experience really taught me a lot much that even when i was instructed to learn python even i did not know python it was a little bit easier not because python is easy and PHP is hard no it was because of the knowledge i have gained from overcoming my previous challenge, one thing i discovered about myself is that i thrive in an environment where there is learning what i mean is somewhere that there are other people like me who i can relate with and its one of the reasons why i enjoyed the boot camp even though it was just for day i met people who were learning like me and even those were better than me .In conclusion the truth is going through this learning challenge has really helped me grow and improve easily in programming area and i am glad i get a chance to meet new challenges so i can learn and grow from them also .