DEV Community: Paul B Kim

My 2 cents on learning web dev as a beginner.

Paul B Kim — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 04:44:45 +0000

Everybody is different when it comes to learning.

But I just wanted to point out that going straight into documentation is just not realistic especially when you just started learning programming. Hence this is not the right advise for everyone. (Again, you may be different than I am.)

I've started learning programming through my bootcamp since August of this year. I had tough time learning in the very beginning because they told me to dive into documentation and somehow understand it without any prior knowledge. And then I had to make lodash from scratch and etc into first 2 weeks of the course. If you're a true beginner, you probably realize anything in MDN hardly makes any sense when you barely understand what loop is or what if statements are.

I think tutorial really helps in this type of situation because it gets you understand some of the concept before going into actual coding and build muscle memory even if it's just by coding along.

Now that I am learning React, and took a tutorial course, everything in the documentation makes much clearer sense. I still go over the videos that I did not understand fully.

What I recommend after this stage is just console logging shit out of everything. For instance, I watched in tutorial video using useState or useRef and I just didn't understand how this whole thing worked. And then I started delving into it by console logging all the functions or methods I didn't understand.

Building something on your own is obviously essential part of learning, but I don't necessarily agree this should be your very first step. After watching tutorial and playing around with a code little bit, building becomes whole lot easier and you can think in much deeper level as to how to make things work efficiently with less code than just making it work.

Another process that helped me a lot in the learning process is to make your own methods of ES5+ JS syntax from scratch. Split, join, spread operator, higher order functions like reduce, map, find. This may sound completely stupid but it actually helps you understand these methods much better. Same thing for node.js. I recommend NOT using express library until you are able to do creating server, basic routing with plain Node.js. Once this part is done, try to make your own middleware as you are using express. I know this sounds tedious, but it actually helps beyond just understanding syntax. Hard concepts like Authentication, or tokenization can be understood much better in this manner.

Last point. A lot of people will disagree with this, but learning React or other libraries without solid javascript knowledge is not necessarily a bad thing. I, for instance, learned JS for only a month and still had a hard time understanding practical usage of Bind, Generator, some data structures like set, and async. A lot of these make much more and more sense as you are using React and Node. Because you are in an environment where you're forced to understand those concepts. If you console log into method, helpers, functions in framework you get to see what they are made of. If you spend time on trying to understand those, a lot of stuff that didnt make much sense in JS become clear.

No matter what they tell you, start learning postgre and mongo as you're learning express. You get much more deeper understanding of web development. You are probably not going to make interconnected database or gigantic schema. But, this way, even if you build just a todo - you will find yourself approaching much differently than when you first started out vanilla js todo.

Now that I understand the basics of react, I now feel urge to learn css and html as I am building UI components myself and I feel like I can learn them much more efficiently.

Learning is just never linear as one might hope. I hope this helps some of you who feel 'lost' in first few weeks of learning....

My first 2 months in a Korean Programming Bootcamp

Paul B Kim — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 03:41:44 +0000

I am in a bit of unique situation.

Since my high school graduation, I've been in the states for my entire life and have not flew out of the country ever since. While I had an interest in software engineering, I couldn't have imagined that I would change my career and programming would be my next career choice, as I was doing just fine in my old job. Long story short, South Korea (NOT North!) became my new home.

What's even more unique about this whole situation, is this circumstance led me to attend a programming bootcamp in South Korea. I was working in finance industry, and this particular field was vastly different between the two countries. I had some money saved up, so I did not have a problem staying without a job for quite a while. But I realized I need a new skill set that I would be able to land a job regardless of where I am living. So I decided I'd give a shot at software engineering.

Luckily for me, I had two very important skills that I took them for granted and never considered to be valuable. Korean and English. Korean is obvious here. For instance, the whole bootcamp interviewing process was conducted in Korean, as... the bootcamp is in Korea! Well, jokes aside, what struck me as a surprise was my English skill was just as valuable. This particular bootcamp that I am attending has ISA(Income Share Agreement) program. And as someone who worked in finance industry, it seemed oddly, very American. The truth is the founder of this organization attended a bootcamp in the U.S. He thought the business model was also viable in South Korea, so he took the whole system to South Korea.

Before I go into detail, I'd be very careful here because I don't know about the legal situation. But it seemed as though the the system is not the only thing he brought with him (well, besides the outrageous price tag). Majority of the course material were in plain English. Well, I digressed a little bit here. All in all, these language skills played a big part in my survival at the bootcamp. I will go in further detail of other stuff in my future blog posts, but let's focus on what I have learned last two months.

The whole course runs for 3 months. And 0 programming experience was required. After that, we will spend last 2 months in building projects as a team. During this time, attendees at the bootcamp are expected to have solid grasp of HTML/CSS, Local Storage / Cookies, JavaScript, Algorithms & Data Structures, Server(Node.js & Express), React and Redux, OAuth2, MySQL / Database, MVC Design Pattern, and React Native. Additionally, we were expected to complete 50 leetcode-like toy problems along with 100 basic algorithms questions.

On the very first day of the bootcamp, everyone was friendly and easy going. There was no lecture or anything and just just good old orientation, and course preview sessions. In that same week, I had to solve algorithm questions like decryptCaesarCipher. Into the second week, I had to write my own lodash.js library in pure JavaScript. Then we quickly transitioned into making Hash Table, DFS, BFS and finally solving N-Queens. I still remember the night when my pair and I finally were able to take down the evil queen. I don't know if this is normal, but I was rarely able to have any bed time thus far. Then the real fun began as we moved onto server side. In the exercises, we made chat servers. Even then, I felt like I only had maybe around 70% of understanding on the topics. It may be that I am just a slow learner. I've always known career change was not easy, but this was absolutely brutal. So kudos to those who have made it to their careers.

Since, this is now thanksgiving in Korea, I have a few days to catch some breath, and go over the materials that I have learned so far. I am worried for next few weeks as we now only have around 3 weeks to learn React, Redux, Authentication, Database, and Design patterns. Then we are expected to build something like e-commerce website.

One of the real values I found in this entire program actually has nothing to do with the bootcamp itself. It was the People. I was able to group up with a few of smart people in the cohort, and stayed all night studying the topics we have learned. It would have been very difficult for me to keep up with sleepless nights if it wasn't for the teammates.

There are still some details here and there that I missed out, but this has been the story of my first two months in the bootcamp. If you have any feedback on learning process or some other tips, I'd very appreciate it if you leave one on the comments. I will comeback once again after I finish the bootcamp!

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Paul B Kim — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 10:35:18 +0000

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