TL;DR:
- Started Learning web developent in July 1, 2019
- Improved myself by building projects and learning via Youtube
- I am now comfortable with Reactjs which landed me a remote (contract) job in the US.
It all started on a day in the last week of June 2019, it was the second semester of my final year in the university. Myself, some friends and neighbors were having a random discussion, we talked about a lot of things before the tech guys took over and started saying things I didn't understand (heck is python, 🐍?), I knew nothing about tech as at that time and I never thought I could ‘code’.
HTML
I gained interest (they started to make sense) and asked for how to get started, I was told to start with HTML. I downloaded a book titled: “STEP BY STEP HTML5” and I wrote my first “Hello World” on July 1, 2019. The book was a few pages long and I thought I would complete programming after I was done 😂
The book advised that I use the inbuilt Notepad on my windows laptop, a week after writing HTML tags I moved to CSS. I discovered I used to write a few HTML tags on WordPress when I was running a blog in 2015. Today, I use Visual Studio Code as my code editor.
LEARNING STRATEGY
Since the book was only on HTML I had to source for knowledge through other channels, I downloaded an app called “SOLOLEARN”, it had free and offline courses on almost all programming languages. I completed lessons on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery and that earned me a shiny certificate.
To learn how to center divs better in CSS, I started watching videos on YouTube, my learning strategy was to:
· Check websites for cool stuff e.g animations, hamburger toggles e.t.c
· Watch YouTube videos on how to implement them
· Try to implement them on my own
That was quite effective for me in learning CSS. At that point I didn’t understand exactly why I needed JavaScript, so I was using CSS to do a few stuff that YouTubers used JavaScript for. My favourite YouTube channels for beginners are: DevED, Traversy Media, Kevin Powell, CodeVolution, NetNinja.
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A video on YouTube by Dev Ed (hamburger toggle video) made me understand JavaScript, it was a simple video showing how to select elements in the DOM and manipulate them with event listeners, cool! I watched a lot of videos on Vanilla JavaScript and I built a few applications with it, what I did mostly with vanilla JS was to manipulate the DOM.
INTERNSHIP
In October 2019 or so, I signed up for the HNG internship, it was a remote internship that helps devs understand how it was to work with a team and improve their skills. I was a newbie when I signed up so I didn’t maximize my time on the platform, I was introduced to Git and Github and a few other super useful tools.
REACTJS
In November, I picked up Reactjs, it is a component based JavaScript library for building User Interfaces (UI). Reactjs improved my JavaScript skills massively, ES6 stuff, working with Arrays, React’s component based architecture helped make me understand a lot on how applications are structured.
This website was built with Nextjs, a framework built on ReactJS to render ReactJS on the server side. React is used to build Single Page Application on the client side, a framework like Gatsby makes it possible to use React as a Static Site Generator. If you are a newbie, all of these terms will be understood as you dive into Reactjs, they made no sense to me too!
Today I am comfortable with Reactjs and Nextjs, I have built a few applications with them, check them out Here
CONCLUSION
Anyone can learn to code, you just have to be able to stare at a computer screen for long hours.
