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When I first started with Scrimba, I was coming from a carpentry background. I knew how to put a computer together physically, but I had no real understanding of what made up a computer's brain. Sure I had the sort of experience that comes from going through high school in the turn of the millennium, how to navigate a Word Document and how to put together a basic Excel spreadsheet, but I was fairly lost going beyond that.
It was a friend of mine who suggested I learn to code. It was during the "slow season" of the Canadian winter, a time when the weather largely prevents me from earning an income leaving the house at all, and he suggested that if I could learn this skill I would never be without work again. I'll admit to being skeptical, after all it sounded to good to be true, but I was willing to give it a shot. As a gift, during a time when I had no income of my own, he even paid my way.
I've always been a hands on learner. You can tell me how to do things all day long, but within the hour I'll forget. You can show me, and I might remember for a day. I can't count the number of times I've come along for a ride to some new location, and can't remember how to get back by the next day. But if I drive the route myself? I'll never forget.
This is what made Scrimba the perfect platform for understanding how to create and craft the code. I was watching it be built, line by line in real time, and then tasked with writing it myself. Forcing my hands to remember the path across the keys, forcing my mind to remember the foreign language on the screen.
Fortunately, learning by doing was something I had a great deal of experience with, having grown up as a member of a 4-H club.
Learn to do by doing - 4-H Motto
Before I could even get into the platform there were challenges. I was navigating a whole new world that I knew nothing about, so the struggle of how to prioritize was a challenging one. As best I was able to tell it looked like this:
- Get signed up on the Scrimba platform.
- Get signed up on the Discord as well.
- Get enrolled into the Frontend Developer Course.
- Get Good.
This was of course the 1000 mile view. Each list item contained within itself another list of lists. Getting signed up on Scrimba involved getting signed up on Github. Getting signed up on the discord required its own little onboarding challenges. I was fortunate to have someone in my corner who had been through it before to help me steer the ship. I moved slowly, testing my legs in new lands, and it took me a couple days to get familiar with the system. For people who have a little more experience I'm sure they could get sorted much faster.
My title was a little misleading, I'll admit, as the first thing I "wrote" is not what I'm going to share here. No, the very first thing I worked on came with training wheels and safety rails. I figuratively held the hand of the instructor as they took me through the basics of HTML and CSS, nearly falling flat on my face at the introduction of JS.
But eventually, once a general grasp of core concepts was reached, I was given a Solo Project. A chance to remove the training wheel and let go of the rails and try to build something completely on my own, with only a basic graphic design as a guidepost. I was tasked with making a basic little site that could do some basic little math.
And this was the result. The very first thing I every truly wrote. It wasn't pretty, any passing semblance of beauty goes only skin deep, but it worked. I don't believe I'll ever get over the sense of wonder I felt as I wrote the last few lines of code and declared it complete. It starting with an empty folder on my computer, and ended with a fully functioning (albeit tiny) website that can do what is asked of it.
Again, I feel I need to hammer on this point (my carpentry background shining through), this was the first thing I ever did alone. The instruction provided, and the training completed, was so thorough that even though I struggled some (as any toddler does when learning to walk) I created something useful in the end.
I've done more projects since then, and perhaps I'll share some of them another time. But for the time being:
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