Why sharing coding experiences matter?
The journey so far ..
After graduating in 2013 with a degree in engineering, I spent the next 3 years of my life trying to figure out what I want to be skilled at. I got a job in a multi-national company soon after college but felt lost amongst the thousands of people around me and the myriads of tech present in an IT service company. One month I would be given training in X, next month I am doing Y. As I start making sense of Y, human resources would think Z will be much better for me. There was no specificity in my role or control in my own hands for my own interests.
But spending the next 2 years there helped me discover the world of design and I became determined to become a UI designer. I picked up some design tools, built a portfolio and started giving interviews. Soon I made the switch and joined a startup in the hope for getting to do what I want to and higher chances of work-recognition. But it didn’t take me long to realize that design is not my forte. It is then when I started to pick up UI development in the same company. I started with coding the websites that I used to design. Used the most basics of tech — HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and copy-pasting jQuery interactions. That work made me happy. I had this feeling of being able to build something, which is up and running, being seen and used by people around me. But having knowledge of just building websites was not enough. I knew my limited skill set would soon become obsolete.
I then took the plunge into JavaScript. By that time (late 2016), JS was not just pieces of code that I used to copy-paste on my websites. It now carries with itself countless frameworks/libraries, front-end as well as back-end powers. It took me time. A lot of time to wrap my head around what JavaScript is. Fortunately enough, during the same time I got some work in office which required building some prototypes using React Native. Once I started digging deeper is when I realized as to how empowering the field of software development is. From the days where I used to build simple websites, I was now able to build a mobile app of sorts and this dream came true by picking up JavaScript.
Today, I have switched my job for the third time in 4 years and I am officially a UI developer.
How being on Medium helped me in my journey ..
I was introduced to Medium in 2015. I used to read random articles on food, tech, life etc. But in the year 2016, when I decided to dive into JS, I started by following Quincy Larson (founder of freeCodeCamp). Soon, I started getting recommendations for JS articles of all types and was overwhelmed with the amount of topics I had to cover.
Frankly, I decreased my time on medium as I just was not able to cope up after reading one or two articles. And then, I landed on this article.
The above article is a must-read for every JS developer out there whether novice or experienced. Because it helps. It seriously does. If you are a beginner who is in similar situation of sorts, you should give this article a try. It is a funny conversational take on learning JS. The author shares his pain of keeping up-to-date with JS frameworks and libraries, which is relatable to say the least.
At first, I could not make sense of all the countless tech terminologies mentioned in there. But then, I decided to use it to my advantage and look at this article as a to-do list. I will go through the introduction of all the new techs mentioned in it and come back to this article time-to-time to see how much I can understand this article now.
During the same time, I stumbled upon few articles written by authors sharing their experiences about becoming a developer and reading them is one of the many things that kept me going.
Below are few articles that I went through.
I am thankful to their authors for sharing their journeys which helped me be more patient and sincere in my own journey.
