Project 0 and the Road Ahead: Kicking Off #100DaysOfCode

Jamal Nezianya — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:28:13 +0000

I'm not yet sure how often I’ll blog here, but I’ve decided to document my coding journey more consistently—starting with daily updates on Bluesky using the #100DaysOfCode hashtag.

I know blogging is a good habit for organizing thoughts, but I’m still figuring out the right rhythm. To get started, I built a basic static site to host my portfolio, which you can check out here. Since it’s a foundational piece, I won’t count it as a full project—let’s just call it Project 0. I deployed it using Netlify.

For a refresher on deployment with Netlify, I followed a tutorial by Esther White, which was clear and helpful. Now that my portfolio page is up and running, I plan to revisit some earlier exercises and personal projects. I’ll blend those with the kinds of concepts we explored in two of my university-level programming courses—let’s call them the second and third programming courses in the CS sequence.

Because of restrictions, I can’t share course materials directly. But the topics I’ll be drawing from include:

University Programming Concepts:

Breaking programs down into logical, manageable pieces (procedural abstraction)
Designing reusable code modules with clear interfaces
Working with stack data structures and dynamic memory
Creating and manipulating linked structures (e.g., singly and doubly linked lists)
Recursive algorithm design and runtime tradeoffs
Reading, parsing, and writing files in C
Using multiple data structures to manage and analyze data
Interacting directly with memory using pointers to optimize computation
Building larger applications using object-oriented practices in C++
Writing clean, maintainable code following industry conventions
Applying knowledge across both low-level and high-level programming languages

Early Bootcamp Projects:

Text-Based Adventure Game

Using JavaScript fundamentals like data types, conditionals, loops, and user input, I built an interactive text game with branching paths. Each path includes:

At least three user decisions

A total of seven or more possible outcomes

One decision with multiple valid responses beyond just "yes" or "no"

Both numeric and string inputs

A loop and a switch statement to handle game flow

JavaScript Calculator

I created an object-oriented calculator in JavaScript. It included:

Core operations: add, subtract, multiply, divide

Exponentiation using Math.pow()

A custom operation of my choosing

All methods could be called and tested from the browser console

Interactive Web Game (Solo Build)

For a browser-based game project, I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to implement one of several classic logic or memory games. The options included:

A puzzle-solving game (e.g., Towers-style stacking)

A trivia or quiz app with scoring

A flashcard review system

A memory game (e.g., Simon-style)

A word guessing game

This was a solo project where I focused on creative problem-solving and DOM manipulation, integrating feedback from peers and mentors during development.

Why I'm Building 12 Projects

Jamal Nezianya — Mon, 19 May 2025 16:54:21 +0000

I completed General Assembly’s Web Developer Immersive in 2016. Back then, the curriculum focused on Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, raw Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node). At the time, everything moved at breakneck speed—and while we covered a lot, I don’t think the fundamentals ever had time to really sink in.

What I did admire was the program’s emphasis on building and deploying projects. You were thrown into the deep end—forced to wrestle with unfamiliar concepts and figure things out as you built. Pre-LLM, that approach made sense. You just pushed through and got something working. Whether that led to long-term understanding, though, was a different story.

It wasn’t until I enrolled in CSMC 203: Introduction to Programming at Montgomery College that things finally began to click. That foundational class helped me breeze through CSMC 206: Python Programming, and from there, everything felt more grounded.

Eventually, I transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago to finish my CS degree. Being at a large public university, many professors rely on autograders to evaluate code. Imagine your first programming project being run through HackerRank or LeetCode-style tests without ever really being shown how to solve a problem. It’s easy to see how that could be discouraging—maybe even enough to push someone out of the field entirely.

And UIC? They pile on the homework, especially in the engineering department.

There isn’t much space to breathe, let alone learn deeply, until the semester ends. I’ve been balancing work and school for a while now, and I finally have the time and mental bandwidth to prove what I’m capable of—not as a cog in an assembly line, but as a developer who builds with intention.

Over the coming months, I plan to build and share 12 projects that demonstrate why I’m a senior developer—and why I’m qualified for just about any role I apply to.

DEV Community: Jamal Nezianya

Project 0 and the Road Ahead: Kicking Off #100DaysOfCode

Why I'm Building 12 Projects