My Scrimba Front End Developer Journey — Entry 2

Mark Harris — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 23:26:25 +0000

I’ve now completed my second week following along Scrimba’s Front End Developer Journey, and my momentum has definitely slowed down — but that was expected. JavaScript is hard. I really love the design of Scrimba though and am slowly picking up on basic JavaScript concepts (as I struggle to do the pre-made challenges throughout each lesson, then redo them after watching Per show how they’re supposed to be done).

This week I’ve been doing Module 3 — Making Websites Interactive, which builds upon the previous modules’ HTML and CSS skills by adding the all magical JavaScript stuff that I’m really here to learn. Overall it’s one of the longer modules with 177 lessons and more than 8 hours of video. As a newbie coder it’s daunting, but also pretty exciting to see how easy it is to make websites more dynamic. In the past I’ve relied on WordPress and pre-built plugins to do these things, but now I can start to see how to do them on my own.

I started by following along and building the passenger counter which seemed simple but I was surprised by how much went into it. Event listeners, iterations, incrementing, and the DOM are just a few of concepts I can remember going over. Then I moved onto building a blackjack game which added if/else statements, arrays, loops, and Math. Child’s play. Then, after that, I built an actual Chrome extension which had me manipulating local drives, storing data, refactoring functions, and manipulating HTML. To say that my brain is fried, is an understatement.

Each of the projects contain dozens of lessons ranging from an hour to almost 3 hours of tutorials, but actually take more than twice as long because you’re pausing and coding along with each lesson. After each project are a series of challenge lessons which force you to use the code you’ve previously learned. The tutorials for those are short though, only about 20 minutes all together, but the coding for them takes much longer. I’m honestly surprised I got through so much this week.

I’ve got one more set of lessons to get through with Module 3 before I can move on, but I may go back and run through this module again once I am done. There’s just a lot of information crammed into this module that I want to understand better. We’ll see once I get through the rest of it.

My Scrimba Front End Developer Journey — Entry 1

Mark Harris — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 02:11:00 +0000

I’m a week into Scrimba’s Front End Developer Path and I’ve never been more motivated to learn to code. I’ve attempted to learn programming in the past but never felt it click. Their guided tutorials with hands-on training in a built in IDE is so perfect for my learning style that I’m optimistic I can finish by the end of the year. It’s an ambitious goal, but I’ve heard it can be done in 3 to 6 months. Which means early next year I may be job hunting. I plan to document my journey here as I go. Fingers crossed…

As of now, I’ve only completed the HTML and CSS portion, modules 1 & 2. I blazed through them though because I’m fairly familiar with both already. I’ve been working in email marketing for a few years and have dabbled in web design periodically, so I have a good foundation in those already. I also did a few freeCodeCamp HTML & CSS tutorials before joining Scrimba as well, which helped. I’m sure the rest of the modules, which all focus on JavaScript, will go much slower and not leave me feeling so confident.

It wasn’t all easy though. Flexbox is a bit new to me, so I’m still wrapping my head around that. In fact, my last project in module 2 didn’t end up the way I wanted because I couldn’t get a flexbox within another flexbox to center properly when on a smaller screen. It was a bit outside of the scope of the project anyway so I wasn’t too worried about it. I googled quite a bit but still couldn’t figure it out. I ended up completing it and submitting it for peer code review to see if someone else could help figure it out. I really like the peer code review feature that Scrimba has built into their curriculum. It really helps to feel engaged with other learners and keep you motivated. They have a dedicated Discord server with lots of channels where students and teachers can interact.

Next up, JavaScript. I’m honestly a little nervous about starting this next module and getting into actual programming. I’ve tried python before and liked it, but I found the program I was in at the time wasn’t a good fit for me. It was more traditional in teaching, but also online, so I just felt like I was watching a YouTube video. I feel like Scrimba is a good fit for me now and I really enjoy how interactive it is, so I’m optimistic about getting through it. Having someone walk you through each step then giving you a chance to practice it immediately is so helpful. It’s so much better than watching videos or sitting through lectures.

That’s about it for this initial post. I’ll try to get one of these up a week with updates on my progress. Thanks for reading!

Oh, this was originally posted by me on Medium (https://medium.com/p/f83dc89a714a), but I thought I'd share it here too.

DEV Community: Mark Harris

My Scrimba Front End Developer Journey — Entry 2

My Scrimba Front End Developer Journey — Entry 1