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JahWayne
JahWayne

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Slow and steady wins the race!

Well, It's been a week since I introduced myself and goals to this community and now it's time for an update! Its hard for me to finish things so giving you guys weekly updates is how I plan to hold myself accountable. So quick recap for anyone who's new to my story, I'm an aspiring full stack dev and I'm currently working on putting together a portfolio to showcase my skills. This is the first project of said portfolio and what I'm working on is creating an ecommerce website using Laravel.

I made a post about starting this last week Sunday and was filled with hype and excitement. I was just bursting to go! I had all these exciting ideas and features I wanted to implement. I literally didn't know where to start. So I calmed down, took a deep breath and decided to start by drafting up a database schema to assess my tables/relationships and that's where it hit me. All the courses that I had taken hadn't really prepared me for real world scenarios like these. I know how to code(somewhat), I know how to create my controllers and routes and migrations etc..., but I didn't know what to do..., I didn't know what to start with or where to begin..., and that's when I really started freaking out!

I also realized that during the online courses I've been taking, I had been lazy with how I search for information. When posed with a problem, I'd find myself searching for solutions rather than explanations and that bad habit carried over into the first few days of me trying to attack the task at hand. I was searching for existing examples of what I wanted to achieve and would get frustrated when I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. One thing I did notice though is whenever I tried getting an answer to a problem I had, one of the common search results were from
Stack Developers on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCExO2i-tLU1NyVZD6zOJQlw) and then I'd skip through the suggested video trying to find what I wanted and then get frustrated because he's building on something that he made like 20 videos ago.

I finally gave in and started watching the complete e-com series uploaded by the Stack developers, (its over 40+ videos mind you) but I must say it has been very useful in helping me with my current project and it was with the help of these videos that I've so far been able to create an admin area for the admin user to update their information and create products for the store.

It's been slow progress unfortunately, working during the days and then trying to squeeze in some coding along with trying to get in exercise is difficult. Sacrifices have to be made sometimes and what's getting most affected is my sleep and exercise. I try to write code for a couple hours each day and I must say that given my initial Panic, I'm proud of myself. I'm pretty much coding everyday too so today I decided to start the 100 days of code challenge to strengthen my JavaScript skills by going through the challenges/tutorials on FreeCodeCamp.org.

That's all until next time!

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