This Week in L2Code: Background
Often, folks tell you to write a blog while learning to code. In general, it is said that it’s a good idea to keep a blog when learning to do anything. This can seem daunting to many, myself included. It sort of amplifies the idea of imposterism (colloquially known as Imposter Syndrome), putting out into the open all of your dirty laundry. I’ve definitely resisted the idea for some time myself.
To start, I’ll give a brief overview of who I am, then on to what I’ve learned, when I started, etc.
I am David. I’ll be 30 in February of 2018. I have a 20x30 list that I wrote, that has some wishlist things I’d like to complete before I’m 30. I’m a husband of seven years and a father to the greatest daughter in the world. Our family is car-free and we commute via bicycle in hilly Seattle. I’m a coffee roaster / coffee program director / educator / wholesale account manager / etc. I’ve never gone to University. In 2007, I graduated from a School of Massage Therapy, but was never able to break out into the field, having lived in a very conservative city where male massage therapists were very frowned-upon.
I decided to learn to code in 2015, over two years ago. Like most decisions I make, I did an overwhelming amount of research before doing any actual learning. I entertained the idea of going to University for Computer Science. After hearing/reading that that is not necessary, I started looking into Boot Camps. There are so many out there that I spent weeks researching this idea.
During my research of boot camps, I found Free Code Camp. I started immediately. I worked through over 80 hours of lessons/code, but stopped about 3/4 through Basic Javascript. I had found another course, this time on Udemy — Colt Steele’s Web Developer Boot Camp. I learned a lot in that course, and I built some pretty cool things. However, I feel the coursework was very much a high level overview of much of what was covered.
After completing Colt Steele’s course, I went to work on a friend’s website. (At the time of this post, the website is still not complete — the client is working on getting new material to replace the placeholder images and text.)
Some time passed after building that website, that I did anymore code. I got a promotion at work that required a lot of physical and mental work on my part, and my wife started a new job as well, where she was now gone until midnight. So instead of picking up our daughter from school and coming home to dive right into coding, I was now so exhausted from the day and had to make dinner and get our daughter ready for bed. I had to find my groove.
Now, I’ve settled into the new schedule, and am working on some new things. Colt Steele came out with an “advanced” Web Developer course. I picked it up for $12, and am hoping that it fills the learning void that I feel I have. I also tried out Meteor, which is a full-stack tool kit with a few varieties. I attempted their React tutorial, but it turns out that it is broken in Step 2, according to my GoogleFu.
Ultimately, I feel that I need to get a strong foundation in JavaScript. It is, after all, the backbone of the internet. I see a lot of success stories from folks that started with Ruby, however, so I might do some work with that.
I’m going to try to make this a regular post — where I give an overview of what I’ve learned. I thought I would make it a little more interesting, though. While I’m coding, I am usually drinking something of note. Be it a brew, coffee, tea, what-have-you. So I’ll give a brief overview of that as well.
