Full Stack Mentorship — Week 1
Published in
2 min readNov 9, 2020
What is this full-stack mentorship all about?
- Deepak Kumar, a full-stack web-developer and the owner of a popular Github Repo called A-to-Z-Resources-for-Students came up with this initiative to mentor 15–20 students for free over a period of 3 months (Nov 2020 — Jan 2021) and help them build 9–10 projects. An important thing to note here is that he does this during his free time away from work, which according to me is really commendable.
The week as it happened…
- I was very excited to be selected as it gave me the chance to meet amazing developers, work, learn and grow together in a group and build some projects for fun.
- The first week was all about revisiting the basics of web development i.e HTML, CSS, JS, Git, Github etc.
- We had to work our way through the freeCodeCamp curriculum (Responsive Web Design, JS Algo & DS) and build and host our personal portfolio.
- Since I had created my portfolio a few months ago (not fully responsive though 😅, CSS is a pain sometimes), I spent the week revisiting some of these concepts, my projects and integrated the contact form in my portfolio with Netlify.
- I learnt about deploying static files and git subdirectories to Heroku and managed to host my freeCodeCamp projects there.
- Wrote some unit tests with Jest
Some of my learnings
- Maintaining consistency is key to growth— I had started a 100DaysOfCode challenge a few months ago to improve myself. Due to various distractions, I lost continuity after 20 days. When I look back at some of the projects I worked on then, I find it tough sometimes to really understand what I had done.
- Get out of the tutorial hell — This is something that I have learnt a little late in my life as a web developer. Tutorials are needed sometimes to understand concepts, but as developers, we can only become confident about our abilities by really building something (doesn’t matter if it is small/big, easy/tough).
- Progress tracking is important — This is a psychological trick to motivate ourself as it can help us understand how far we have come. The green dots on Github, regular Twitter/Linkedin posts about learnings all go a long way in making ourselves feel significant.
My first week has really not been that great according to me but I just want to keep going and not worry about the end results. The ultimate goal is to learn, grow and become a better version of my current self. Stay tuned for week 2 updates.
