I wasted too much time (October 2018)
It’s my first monthly recap and I glanced it from Emmanuel Raymond who writes the best monthly recaps in the internet. I think it’s pretty cool to document your coding (and not only coding) journey so other people and you from the future can see it. So here we are, the first one…
I wanted to learn new JS framework. New library. I wanted to code something cool. For a very long time… And every day (or at least very often) I see posts on facebook saying: “is it better to learn X or Y?”, “the best code editor is…?”, “I’m wondering which language should I learn if I want to become a programmer.”, “do you recommend this library if I already know this and this?”. Yeah, it’s kinda understandable, people want to know which technology/framework/library is worth the most of their time, which one will let them fulfill their ideas.
It would be a huge mistake if you learn Vue or Angular when in fact React is so popular right now, right?
- No.
It sucks to still use Brackets when Visual Studio Code is so grown, has many more extensions and let’s you use some color themes that your code editor can only dream about, right?
- No.
You would regret so much that instead of going for Python you sticked with PHP you really liked in school so you thought it might be a great choice for your first language!
- Well, it might give you some headache, but I think answer is still no.
I want to stop focusing on the things that doesn’t really matter.
Sure, it’s good to check the documentation of both React and Vue to see which one might be better for you to learn. And taking a look at some modern code editors may save you some time. And picking your first language probably shouldn’t be a coin toss.
But if you focus on those things too much, which is better, which is more worth my time, which is trendy… You may end up in the exactly same place you were some time ago knowing the best code editors with all their features, differences between every modern JS framework and languages percentage use per year… but still not knowing how to code.
I honestly don’t care if React is better than Vue no more. I don’t give a damn about VSCode features that Atom or Brackets don’t have. And I’m really not interested in JavaScript being more popular than PHP. Because I already read about it a whole lot and it didn’t help me in any way to become a better web developer/programmer. Not saying you should completely cut from these things, but just be honest with you. How do you spend your time?
Alright, but I learnt something useful this month, didn’t I?
Vue is actually pretty cool.
I started really learning Vue. Some tutorials at first, then documentation. When I took a part in Google Code-in I had an opportunity to chat with many students that also took a part. Some of them were really really talented. I asked one of them how is he learning new technologies/languages. He said he never uses tutorials, only docs and practice. I never actually thought about it this way but it makes sense. You learn the most when you DO stuff, practice. And who knows let’s say a framework better than the creators? Still though I watched tutorial to see what can I use Vue for and how it generally works. Now I’m making a simple pomodoro app to practice it on my own. Nothing big but you always have to start somewhere. And I still think tutorials are a great way to learn if you don’t overuse them.
Riot API app — failed.
I play some League of Legends and I thought it may be a great idea to combine it with coding and make an app based on Riot API. I gave up pretty quickly after I’ve seen what I need to get the data I want. Maybe somewhere in the future…
School.
From this year I’m no longer attending to school. I have home schooling now which means I learn at home. I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time but that’s a story for individual article. So far so good.
New article.
Today my new article was posted in Codeburst! “How to start contributing to Open Source?”. I’m really satisfied with the result.
Birthday!
This has to be the most positive part of this article, I had birthday! My 18th birthday! Well, let’s be happy! 😄
