DEV Community: Jawdat Tayfour

A1 To B1.2 Without a Teacher

Jawdat Tayfour — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 21:50:09 +0000

I learned German without a teacher. Yes without a teacher and all from the Internet.

Let me tell you how!

My journey started in the middle of September after my last birthday. At first I had no study routines for learning the language, so just like if you asked a toddler about something today, I did the predictable. Opened up YouTube and typed in "How to learn German". The first few results were the one that I'll ride with the whole journey. It was an A1 Playlist from "Learn German", a channel that is made by a wonderful teacher who in all of her videos neither over explain nor under explain. She's teaching the language in a sequence of 10 minute videos. 60+ Videos for the first level [A1]. 40+ Videos for the second level [A2]. 40+ Videos for the third level [B1]. Which all sum up to around 1500 minutes, dividing by 60, we get 25 hours. A question popped in mind, can I really reach B1 in German through a 25 hours course?
Should I lower my expectation?. Well, Imagining and wondering won't answer the question, but trying will. I started my Journey.

3 weeks pass by and my sister recommends me a book series called MENSCHEN (English Translation: People). I get excited, since I like reading and learning and I expect that a book series would have more exercises for me to practice writing, reading, and even listening to the language. I hop on into the internet and start looking out for that series. A problem appears! it's too long and too heavy for me to carry both a Course Book and An Exercising Book side to side with a YouTube Series. And I really started getting used to the teacher on YouTube. Her videos are enjoyable and makes me like the language more and to some extent I feel less lonely learning because there are people in the comments thanking her and giving updates on their progress on every video just like myself.

I had an awesome Idea. Why not learn the Theoretical side of the language from the YouTube Series and exercise with the Work-Book? I start applying this style of studying. Learning a Lesson, digging up the exercises and repeat.
It's working, I'm noticing my progress through watching some German Memes on the Internet every now and then for a good laugh while also training my eyes and ears.

And that was the pillar that supported my German until I delved into the German culture, music, humor, news media and so on. Which was right after I finished the A2 Playlist and started with my B1 Playlist and Books. But that's a story for the next Week.

Follow me so you get tuned when I post the rest of the Journey.

[Links For The Books And The YouTube Channel]

8 Months Recap.

Jawdat Tayfour — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 21:48:21 +0000

8 Months Recap.
Back on Saturdays just like before, here's why I stopped posting about my growth here for the past 8 months. Last September I started learning German, completely on my own. No courses, no language schools, no online tutoring. Just me and grammar books and YouTube videos explaining them.
At first I was skeptical that I'm going to achieve this huge goal, but as things took off and I started understanding German content on the Internet, I felt that there may be some hope.

The Final goal was to reach the intermediate level or according to The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), the goal was to pass an acknowledged B1 exam such as Goethe's. And yesterday, the news came, the good news if I may. An email from the institute with the opening line: "Herzlichen Glückwunsch! Sie haben die Prüfung Goethe-Zertifikat B1 erfolgreich abgelegt." which directly translates to "Congratulations! You have successfully passed the Goethe-Zertifikat B1 examination.". Off course I was happy because I passed the test, but there was more to it. See dear reader, passing the exam on my own increased my self confidence by at least ten times. Because the Image in mind started to get clear that if I planned something well and poured my effort into it as well, good things will happen.

I Took the TOEFL last year completely on my own and got a solid 87 out of 120. I Took Goethe B1 Exam this year and nailed a 91 in writing, an 85 in speaking, an 80 in reading and finally a 63 in listening. Now the the last one was a shock to me especially seeing the huge margin between it and the other marks. Moreover, one of the things that helped me getting better at German were the audio-books and the German music I listened to, so how come I score the least on the thing I did the most? Personally I believe it was the stress of the exam.

I was so fearful of the dialects (especially the Swiss one) and I have to admit it. No matter the reason, there's one clear thing to me now. I have to practice more, I have to give more time and effort consistently to improve on this awesome skill I acquired. And I'll do that side to side with the journey I'm starting next month. I will start learning JS as it's the last element in my skill chain as a web-developer that I haven't collected yet. Next Saturday, I'm going to speak about the resources I used to learn German and the incredible series of "MENSCHEN". Until then, friends!

Sorry!

Jawdat Tayfour — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:42:32 +0000

_NO ARTICLE THIS WEEK. _

I'm learning German, Working on a cross platform project and growing my independent business on Fiverr.

Have A Good One!

Independent

Guess?

Jawdat Tayfour — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 21:13:00 +0000

Hey There!

It’s the 18th of september and you’re reading Dev Journey #9 by Jay

Last week I talked about how I canceled my latest project because it wasn’t serving any purpose although it was finished properly.
This Week I’ll be talking about my new project and the importance of adding objective complexity to your web project.

I will start by informing you that I’m an indie game developer aside from being a web developer that uses Django framework. I have developed 5 mini-games all platformer based (the same template of the old Super Mario game series). I have also been working with Django and creating web projects for almost 4 months now.

In my new project I decided to unify the best of both worlds. I have always been inclined towards puzzle games and the idea of challenging the human brain in order to make it think outside of the box.

You can find this theme even in my first ever game where I made the main goal of the game is to remember parts of conversations that narrates a story throughout the game.
But, how can I bring the realm of web development into the game sector of our industry?
The answer lies within one game that I have played not long ago. The game name is spent.

Spent is a game that put you in the shoes of someone who is living paycheck to paycheck.
And it’s only available online.
I took that concept and merged in my own way with the most famous newspaper game - crosswords - and came up with a game with an infinite amount of levels. You may ask me how, right?

Well, let me introduce you to “Guess”!

_Guess _is literally as the name tells, a guessing game. With each level you’re faced with some sort of a riddle with a couple of hints to answer the question that is asked. And once you finish all the levels of the game you can add your own level, yes, your own riddle that all players are going to try and answer and that they will have to answer in order for them to finish the game if they played it after you.

I already started working on some simple sketches and designs for the game, the game will only be available on the official website of the game. You will be able to create an account to track your progress and enjoy other people’s riddles. Hopefully the project will be ready in the next 10 days.

Now, I wanna talk about objective complexity, and I said “objective” because we all know how unnecessary complex stuff is an instant turn off for both the gaming and web development communities. When you add a complicated feature that serves a purpose to your project it seems clever and playful unlike when you add it only for the sake of it.
Because, when that happens, people start to receive your project as nerdy and not-so-cool.

A good example of objective complexity is the adding-levels feature in the my new project, the process of approving a riddle that is written by a user will be a pain in the … and I can say that before even starting working on the backend of the project, but whenever I bring the idea to someone in my life they seem to be interested and looking up to how this will work and how will it look, and that is because they have never heard of something like it before and that it’ll give them the opportunity to do the one thing that humans crave the most, it’ll give them the ability to CREATE.

So as a tip for this week, I’d recommend you to go build something awesome and add a layer of complexity that will make the fun more fun. And make people fall in love with your creation as a product developer.

Thanks for reading, have a great week.

Analyze it to Monetize it

Jawdat Tayfour — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 23:11:39 +0000

Dev Journey #8

One of the crucial skills that a developer should have in my opinion is the skill to analyze where things went wrong and how. To dive in the depth of this ocean of reasons to why you should be capable of “analyzing” we should list the steps of the creative process of a developer.

Step 1 Innovate:

This is where we get the spark of the idea we want to bring to life.
For me the idea for the project that I want to talk about in this week’s article was born out of the womb of having a game development team. It’s as simple as this: A game-dev team → an official website for the team to publish games. I didn’t need the time that is needed most of the time when coming up with a new idea because the reason for this project is pretty generic.

Step 2 Scheme:

Scheming consists of designing the project’s skeleton, the demographic it’ll serve, the cost of creating the project both financially and time and effort cost, coming up with the sketch for interfaces and choosing the right tools.

The project skeleton was pretty predictable, an admin page for data entry, templates for interacting, a contact form and maybe a newsletter to keep the users informed of the latest products.

The demographic that we are targeting are the people who play indie games by underground game development teams, so, quirky young gamers from age 15 to 25. For this demographic we need to keep the usage simple due to their inclination to upfront processes and direct way of dealing with websites.

The cost financially was basically zero until the point we scale up the website for 100K+ monthly visitors which I don’t think will happen soon. But, when it came down to time and effort it was pretty costly, and that it because we still don’t have any official releases as a team and the website will have no use until we gain some traction, and this was one of the things that made me consider the decision to make this project a wrong one(more on that later).

The sketch for the interfaces took me about 2-5 hours due to the lack of need to complicate things. Personally, I think it was better than my latest design and I saw myself getting better at creating a front-end which was great!

The right tools were basically all I know in web development. Django Framework, raw HTML & CSS, render for deployment because it ease up the pain of hosting a Django project and has a pretty robust project management , Git and Github, Pipenv for virtualenv management, PostgreSQL database because it’s the most compatible with Django and it works pretty awesome when scaling up the project and Gmail SMTP service for contact forms and/or the newsletter.

Step 3 Build:

This is where we take the schemes and turn them into mini tasks and start completing them one after another and gather all the pieces at the end for one complete product. Take it to the production server (I would have said staging server before production but the project is way small to do all that work) and see how it will turn out.

Step 4 Refine:

Test performance in a live environment and try to boost it to the maximum. Test it on multiple devices, catch the bugs, tell others to give some feedback and use it to fix minimal bugs because major ones should be dealt with in the development server.

Step 5 Reflect :

Did the project serve its purpose?, Where did it fall short ?,
What was it lacking ?,
Did you commit to the scheme you have laid?,
Is this product ready to be consumed by users?,
How would this project look on your C.V/Github?,
What have you learned?,
How is this project different from the last one ?,
What to do with the project (if it was a personal project)?,
Where to go from here on ?

And many more questions that’ll help you know your project and help you improve professionally…

Now, why analyze? As you might have noticed already every stage of the creative process has its own version of analyzing, when building you’ll analyze your code to assure that it is working, when scheming you’ll analyze the workflow you should follow, when you refine you should analyze your and others feedback and so on …

The project I spent the last two weeks working on saw the light of day for 3 days and tonight I will suspend it.

Although It helped me improve my set of skills, It lacked the most important thing a project should have, A NEED.
The team has no releases, and even if we had, we can serve them up on an itch.io page until we actually feel the need to isolate our works from the indie space. And I could have actually used the time I put in building this project to build a project while learning more about API’s and reading the third of the William S. Vincent trilogy for Django, “Django for APIs: Build web APIs with Python and Django” which I will start with tonight because as I have seen learning to work with API’s is crucial in the job market.

Wish me luck :) Thanks for reading

NO XP NO JOB, NO JOB NO XP

Jawdat Tayfour — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:16:53 +0000

Hello there,

Dev Journey #7

you are probably wondering about what do I have for this week.

Lucky you, this week’s topic is all about how to build your experience, even if you’re a senior 10x dev or some mastermind in programming.

If you’re interested, stick until the end of this article. I will start by saying that, I have never personally felt like we tackle this topic in our industry the correct way. Because when a junior dev asks the question of “How can I become more experienced?” The answer he gets almost every time is to build more projects and tackle issues in open source projects on GitHub.

Which is to some extent correct and sound, but while the junior dev is getting the same answer all time. His critical mind starts working on another answer that satisfies his needs for a straight route or an obvious answer. The other answer he concludes is the cursed loop of “need experience to get a job, needs job to get experience”, which is also true to some extent, but the puzzle never seems to be solved and the picture never seems to be complete.

Most people

deny the second answer because it’s not logical and go with the “go build stuff” answer. A lot of devs actually find no progress after making a couple of projects. And they start coming up with conspiracy theories around why they feel slow compared to their friend who found a job six months from the day she/he wrote her/his first line of code.

And I think that the problem with building projects to gain experience starts when the developer keeps on building the same project but under different disguises every time. And I can say it because I’ve been there before. I have built three games that are almost identical in mechanics.

Hoping to elevate my experience in game development. As you expect, it never happened. But that was a lesson for me, I’m not creating indie games any more, but when I switched to web development I took that lesson with me. Now whenever I take the decision to start a project, I ask myself, how is this one different from the previous one and how is it similar to it.

This problem

can happen when you tackle open source project’s issues, you start contributing to the same issue but just in different projects. And even if you got lucky and somehow ended up in the job you want, if you occupied the same position but hopped between companies you will end up in the same rabbit hole the same-project devs are in. So, what now?, should you collect your skills one after another throughout your projects?

I’m not here to give you half an answer, I’m an all-or-nothing person and the solution to the rabbit hole I mentioned earlier isn’t just to create different projects. But, to always keep an eye on the job market and the skills needed and to put whatever skill that is on-demand the most on your next project skill goal, and if you found yourself capable it’ll be better if you tried to apply it on the current project and explore its depth on the next one.

This way your path to gain experience will be the most efficient path. And, since there is no such thing as a set of technologies that will make you qualified to get your dream job and not even to get yourself a normal job, the best you can do is to always try to match your set with the standard of the industry.

As always

Thanks for reading!

P.S. I wanted to write about the project that I'm working on currently but unfortunately I slowed down while writing my unit tests so it's not finished yet.
maybe next week ^_^

When Lost, Choose All.

Jawdat Tayfour — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 22:28:51 +0000

Dev Journey #6

Hello Fella LinkedIn-istas, today I’m back with another update on my web-development journey.
Ever since the post I put out last week, I’ve been so lost.

Should I continue to learn Django Rest Framework?
Should I start learning JavaScript since it’s required in every web development job ever?
Should I stop thinking ahead of myself and just focus on creating new projects to add to my portfolio ?
How should I go about my journey?

It felt like I was driving on a highway really fast and I couldn't find an exit to continue driving to my destination. A couple of reddit posts, dev talks and YouTube tutorials later, I got it all figured out!

I decided that I should do everything I mentioned above and more. The trick lies within the order. As a person who loves Depth-First-Search strategies, I’ll start with making a couple more Django projects that serve different areas of life in general.

Currently I’m working on a company landing page for my game development team (StageRibbon), next up I’ll try to make a database website, where you can store data and view them in a variety of ways (charts, spreadsheets and more.. ) just to sharpen my skills in building CRUD(Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionalities, viewing different types of data and manipulating them with a simple user interface and in securing a website’s data flow.

Once I finish my next project, I’ll hop on learning DRF (Django Rest Framework).
Once I’m comfortable with that I’ll then go ahead and start to build some real frontend skills with JavaScript.

And since I know that learning a new programming language is a long journey and I really need a job as soon as possible, I decided to take a rough turn and try freelancing.
Now, I know that you are probably thinking that it isn’t going to work and it’s a total waste of time, and that’s what I myself heard when I went asking for people's views on freelancing.

BUT

, what pushed me to that corner is that most of the stuff required on websites like **Fiverr **are simple and doesn't require a lot of complicated work, that, and the fact that I’m not limiting my work there with web-development.

I just posted my first service (Called Gig there) and I offered nearly free music production for multiple purposes (songs, games, videos, trailers and such).
And I’ll just sit and wait for the results. I’m not hoping for anything to happen, but if it did, it’ll motivate me to grow my skills even more and seek new limits for myself.

I’m posting about this dilemma that I faced recently to encourage any developer stuck in a place like the one I’m at to seek people’s advice and to try different things even if they are kind of frowned upon by the majority of the community.

Because I believe in trial and error. I also believe that nobody knows nothing about anything until he/she realize that he/she knows nothing about it. And this journey to explore beyond the norm is our mission as humans to discover the unknown.

Until next time people !

Django Dev Journey #5

Jawdat Tayfour — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:25:00 +0000

Portfolio Published, The Friends We Made Along The Way..

Finally, my first baby came to life.

I have been studying web development for a while now ..
Got to a place where I can say that I'm Django Developer, Not the best but still a one. I deployed my portfolio a few hours ago on render.
Everything that I used to create this project:

Programming Languages: Python, HTML(MarkUp Language), CSS
Framework: Django
VCS: Git
Package Management: Pipenv
PostgreSQL
render.com
And many small packages like WhiteNoise for staticfiles serving, Psycopg Database Adapter and CKeditor...

Don't be fooled by the start of the article, my portfolio definitely isn't my first Django project, but it's the first however to be deployed and fully working and ready to be used.

After reading the books of William S. Vincent about Django, which, taught me a lot about web-development with Django. I came to the conclusion that there is no website that is up and running today with one or two technologies not even 4.

Which is a fantasy that I have to admit that I had before starting with web development. Another thing that I have to admit is that I underestimated the amount of work a front-end developer does in the creation of a fully functioning website.

Other things that I never thought of practically before making this project are the security concerns of launching a website and I said practically, because, of course I thought about the security of my website before and how to prevent any damage and cyber attack to happen, but never thought of exactly HOW can I protect it.

As the saying from my country goes.. Live another day, learn another thing ..
After learning about all of the things I mentioned above, I realized that I really over evaluate myself when I think of how much I know about web development.

But personally, I think that this is the way you go, if I was to discourage myself and put myself down I would have never learned and never earned. I think that you should think of an educational material as easy before you start learning it and confronting its difficulties. And even then, you should talk yourself out of fearing those obstacles and remind yourself that within the right amount of time you can conquer every concept of a matter if you are really willing to put the effort.

And after going through all the storms of ignorance, you'll forget your pain, discover that the tools you learned about are the friends you made along the way and enjoy the sunrays of knowledge.

My Portfolio

HEY YOU, YES YOU ...

Jawdat Tayfour — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 23:30:24 +0000

DO YOU HAVE THE MILLION DOLLARS IDEA ?

DO YOU HAVE A FEW BUCKS IDEA ?
DO YOU HAVE AN IDK HOW MUCH $ IDEA ?

Hand it, straight to me. I'll make it from the scratch, front-end, back-end or whatever it requires.

I'll write it all from the scratch and hand you the source code to do whatever you like with it. For free.

Who am I ?
My name is Jawdat (just call me Jay), I'm a python developer I have worked on 5 mini games on my own and managed to publish them on itch.io and people made a little bit of noise around them in a way that made me feel good about them.

Currently, I'm not working on any games, for the past few months I dived into the realm of web development and made over 15 or so pet projects (blogs, stores, static websites .. etc) you can find most of them on my Github repo. I'm bored of toy web apps and want to try to create something that will challenge my abilities.

I can bet many are now making fun of me or this post in general.
but anyways here are my conditions for making you idea come to life.

1- It has to be a website, static or an actual web app.
2- I can upload it to my Github and/or add it to my portfolio.
3- We'll agree on a deadline before I start working on the project.
4- I can refer to you as a client if I was asked about the project.

if the conditions sound good to you, comment your idea or email to
" 18jwdat@gmail.com " with a title of "My Idea from DEV.TO"

this is an gif of my work (the only work that I think is proper to put up currently)

Django Dev Journey #4

Jawdat Tayfour — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 15:31:49 +0000

Well well well, it's me again!
If you never seen this profile picture before, then, let me introduce myself.
My name is Jawdat I'm an indie game developer, and, for the last several months I have been entering the web development realem.
It started out as a job hunt for me since web developers are the most demanded among all other developers. Thinking to myself "It can't be that hard to learn web development". Turned out that I'm correct about what I was thinking, it isn't that hard to learn web development. But, what I have underestimated is the depth of this field and the different kind of joy that you feel practcing it.
I started with "Django for Beginners: Build websites with Python and Django" by William S. Vincent a great book that teaches you about the main pillars of developing a web-app in django framework such as CRUD functionalities (Create,Read,Update,Delete) and many other fundemental concepts like deployment and class based views etc..
After learning every project in that book I took off on my own and tried creating toy projects like the ones you see popping of on the surface of the Internet. I then built a website that I posted about earlier on my profile, it's called "LoveLocks" which is somewhat of a social media platform desinged to serve the purpose of creating eternal memorial posts expressing love among indeivduals (you can read all about it on my page). I thought to myself that now I am fully capable to be the web developer I aspire to be with this knowledge inside my brain. I soon after that, learned, that I was no where close to what I have on my mind.
I got on the learning Journey again and headed to the next book of the sequel, "Django for Professionals: Production websites with Python & Django". The moment I started that book is the moment I stopped posting on my LinkedIn & Dev.to account about my projects I learned that the rabbit hole goes way deeper than I thought it is. And that I need to take it nice and easy and walk the path in baby steps. I learned about different types of security concerns, how to work with Docker (shallow knowledge ofc because the book isn't about Docker ) since all the companies and dev teams use it, how to handle static files and file upload in a decent way and many more topics while building the bookstore webapp that the book was teaching me how to build. And, now, I took the decision never to think of this learning road as a marathon that has a finish line but a boat trip on a long riverthat takes your breath each time younotice something new about the forest that the river crosses.
I started working on my portfolio website, learned a bit more CSS concepts beyond the the fundementals to make the website stand on its feet. And going with the flow hoping that by the time I find myself a Job as Junior Web Developer I'll have the experience of a Senior web developer

Thanks for reading a long, wish y'all a good week!

Django Dev Journey #3

Jawdat Tayfour — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 22:17:45 +0000

" The bridge couldn't survive and the Town Hall was forced to remove them in 2015 after part of the bridge collapsed."

That is where this project started.

I read an article which I will link down below that the love padlocks were removed off “Pont Des Arts” bridge.

I was in the middle of reading “Django For Beginners” by William S. Vincent, which I mentioned in previous posts of mine.

I had this Idea to transfer the whole Love Padlock concept into something virtual that anyone from any place can take part in. Since, I missed my chance to place my own padlock on Pont Des Arts.

I started the project with the same blog concept that I learned from the book. I wanted to do more than just a blog but my skill set wasn’t totally ready for such a huge thing as what I ended up wanting this project to be, which is a form of a social network.

I have already built the skeleton of the website.
I replaced the old signing up mechanism with one that uses email verification to ensure that all of my users are real users. And got to learn more about tokens generation, temporarily links and how verifying by email works

I also implemented the password reset and password change the same way the book taught me to. So that wasn’t so new to me except the fact that writing the code for it without copying and pasting is pretty challenging.

I also learned how to fetch certain data from the database through reading many blogs and watching many tutorials about the subject, I created my own very simple User-Search functionality in this website.

I have also learned how friend/follow requests work on huge websites (or at least just the concept behind it ) by creating my own type of requests which I called “Lock Requests”.
A Lock Request is just the trigger for creating what I called a Padlock.
And a padlock in this scenario is a mutual Post that has a title of choice “You and the other person’s motto as I assumed”, the date when your story started, your story but this one is optional because not all of us are writers or have the skill to write a good story.

Ok, so the whole thing until this point work this way to put it simply:
Create an account and verify from the link in you email
Login to your account
Search for the account of the person that you want to create the padlock
Request to create a lock with them (send a Lock Request)
Wait until they accept the request
Once they accept it, you can add the details to the padlock
Then, the padlock will be sent for them to read,add,delete and fix anything about the details that you have added
When they finish up with the padlock the padlock gets published
Once it’s published it cannot be removed nor viewed until the anniversary of your story, which, you have entered previously while creating the padlock.

What can you do with the website after you create the padlock, or, if you didn’t have the ability to create a padlock (You had no one that you would like to share such an experience with)?

You can scroll through other’s stories and mottos and add comments of your own which will show up on your profile for you to revisit whenever you want.

What happens on your Lock’s anniversary ?

You can view and modify your padlock.

Can you search for certain padlocks that you have not commented on?

Yes, just search their motto/title in your padlock search bar which only appears if you have created a padlock with someone.

- What’s next ?

For the next week I will be writing tests and fixing some minor issues with the project,
Such as which user can visit which page and under which circumstances.
I’ll go back to practise some more problem solving, just to keep my knowledge about Algorithms and Data Structures fresh in my memory

Once I make sure the whole project is sound and ready to push it into a github repo, I’ll make it an open source project which everyone can contribute to and take part in. Hopefully, that will happen in the next one or two weeks.

I’m gonna start working on two small projects right after I put this project up on my github, and continue with my Django journey with William S. Vincent’s next book, Django for Professionals: Production Websites with Python & Django.

Link for the article I mentioned :

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2022/09/16/paris-fights-back-against-love-locks/?sh=3f220651298a

Link for my GitHub:

https://github.com/Jawdat-Tayfour

Thanks for reading.

Expect the unexpected

Jawdat Tayfour — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 00:43:25 +0000

Looking back at the past few years and comparing what the world was like, and, what "getting a job in programming" meant for me, I consider myself a fool, don't be like myself.

almost three years ago, I decided what I want to do to make a living for the rest of my life. I was 16 approaching 17, now, I'm 19 approaching 20. Programming was and still is the major passion of mine side by side with music.

Ever since I was 9 years old I dreamed of making my dream open-world game. I drifted and explored many other fields while growing up, I tried working at a restaurant as a delivery boy, a kitchen staff, and a waiter (that was possible for me as a teenager because I lived in a very poor country and there was nothing such as a law that prevents Child labor or maybe there was but it was not applied in real life.)

Anyways, I hopped between supermarket Jobs, restaurant, and learning how to breakdance, eventually, I got back to my original dream "To make my dream game". I started playing with programming languages and game engines, I tried Unreal engine and Godot (Godot 3 & and UE4 were the latest versions of both). made a couple of platformer mini games, 5 to be specific, they all got a total of 100 downloads on itch.io - I will link my page down below - after seeing the reality of game making and how hard it is in the real world, I realized that no matter how passionate or how much do you love to create things and express your passion, you need to put in the work, time, and the a real boring plan if you really want to make it.

The thing that triggered me to write this mini article/story or whatever this is, is that, my realization back then intimidated me in the worst way possible, I stopped programming, my knowledge in Data structures and algorithms was already small, so it faded away after a year or so, my dream of becoming a real game developer and opening my own game studio suddenly was so far away.

In a year or so I got my General Certificate of Secondary Education with an overall 94.17% which meant in my country that I can enroll in a the best college of my country and study to become an I.T. I did. For a year, and then I reflected on my behaviors and immediately knew that I wasn't taking college seriously enough to actually learn something from it and that the quality of the education in my university wasn't the best and that I can get something better.

The goal at this point is to enroll in a better university and get my **** back together so I can get back to chasing my dreams. Ok. Got it. I looked up what I should have to enroll as an international student in a better university, luckily enough my GCSE qualify me and I don't need to take the SATs but what I needed was a language proficiency proof. I studied for 3 months and planned to travel to take the TOEFL August, 2022.

Unfortunately, I can't take the TOEFL in my home country and I need a visa to travel. The visa took 6-7 months to be issued regardless of other docs I needed to travel. So, I stopped studying for the TOEFL and every tip and technique that I learned were totally forgotten.

March,2023 I travel thinking that I can take the TOEFL right away and that once I settled I will schedule my TOEFL exam day and take it and that's it. Well, I took a mock up test and gave marks to myself following ETS rubrics. After the first mock up test I knew that I should re-plan and study and learn everything from the start again.

I am one of the few lucky people that did have the ability to stay out of their home country and have someone to back them up financially. I studied for 40 days all day and all night (yes, I didn't work). Took the test in May,2023 and got a pretty nice 87 out of 120.

I started applying to universities, and learning about what studying abroad means. I started thinking about work and paying my own bills. I can't rely on my people forever, in fact, I can't rely on them further than this year. which meant that I should find me a Job before new year's eve or somewhat around that time.

I spend the rest of May rebuilding my knowledge in Algorithms and Data structures and planning for future Tech interviews.
That leads us to June 2023, I started reading a book about Django, because I wanted to work with python and that I wanted to work a part time Job so I can focus on my university, and, web-dev part of the industry really offers that the most and the lowest entry barrier compared to other parts.

I got back to programming again. I'm still practicing DSA.
I already built around 10 tutorial mini projects. I'm building C.V Projects in Django, and I'm actually pretty passionate about a certain project and I'm working on developing it one step at a time. I made a promise to myself to never quit no matter how hard, boring, intimidating and challenging things get.

In my free time, I gathered many friends online to create my first game dev team and although we failed a game Jam and only made one demo in a span of 45 days, we are planning to get on another project in September for a Dungeon Crawler Jam.

And I'm posting about my progress once or twice a week ( regardless of this post ) I'll summarize what to take from this whole story about myself.

Don't get intimidated by the unknown, discover it.

If I kept up sharpening my skills it would have been easy for me to get a real Job in web dev or maybe even better in game dev.

Don't waste time, especially, if your are a 16-20 Y.O and trying to get into programming.

Good programming skills are the results of long practicing hours and experimentation with many different things, make it a part of your daily routine.

Expectations accuracy depends on how real your plan is.

Ok, in the year or the year and a half that I took off programming I didn't actually stopped making things 100% I made a total of 10 projects that I sold for friends/local store owners/connections irl. But what my expectation missed was that, I won't always remember how to do everything that I have done once or twice before or during a period of time, also, that I can't get a visa in a day or two, a week or two or a month or two, it took me 6 months. So that makes the time delay of my plan nearly a year.
A year of my life was wasted. all because of unrealistic planning.

Keep on pushing forward and be open-minded, always.

Pushing forward prevented me from making the time I wasted cross over 1 year. being open-minded helped me look at other choices and life plans that were not directly available or accepted by myself or my family.

Finally, sorry for any typos.

my mini games

https://justjaygames.itch.io/

music that I have created during the year I spent in college back home

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZXxvgwvoatw9vQXqH_7ejg

A lovely playlist to listen to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheJjtaE_fs

My LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jawdat-tayfour-ba517a19b/

My GitHub

https://github.com/Jawdat-Tayfour

**_

Thanks for reading

_**