DEV Community: Pavel Berlin

DOM Manipulation Milestone

Pavel Berlin — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 05:34:37 +0000

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since I've posted anything here and there were good reasons for it. No, it's not about COVID-19 though I in fact had it (very mild one). More about several obstacles and stops on my webdev journey.

Anyway, after dropping coursed, many frustrations and much more successes I have finally arrived to something I consider to be a real milestone of my journey - DOM Manipulation. Yeah, I know, sounds kinda naive, but I will explain.

For quite some time now I've been learning HTML, CSS & JS, getting some results, sometimes failing and succeeding again. But despite all the successes on my way I couldn't really say that can accomplish something real or solve some practical problem with my coding skills.

Building a homepage or coding a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter that works in console is well and good, but not that practical and/or satisfying. It all changes with DOM manipulation. Everything clicks and you suddenly see how it all works together. More than that you now see a lot of practical problems around you that you can tackle. You might not be able to solve them all yet, but you have quite a good understanding of how and where to start.

That feels very refreshing and gives so much more confidence.

"So, Pavel", you might ask, "which problems have you solved already". Well, frankly speaking, not a single one for now. The only page I have finished is this Rock-Paper-Scissors Game done as a part of the Odin Project front-end course, but I'm working on some aids for my TTRPGs and see a lot of things I can (probably) do to improve my day to day life, work & learning.

The end of starry-eyed noob post)))

Random thoughts of a dev noob #2

Pavel Berlin — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 14:07:19 +0000

Finished Basic Javascript, ES6 & Regular Expressions of the Basic Javascript today. What can I say? Responsive Web Design challenges were waaaay easier. More hitting the wall, less rolling over the challenges, more "hey I am really fit for this!?" thoughts (is that what they call the Impostor Syndrom?).
The hardest challenges were recursive functions (still not sure I got them right, probably not, probably need much more practice) and (surprisingly for me) regular expressions (I've spent more time on these 33 challenges than on both Basic JS & ES6 (111 + 31).

Interestingly enough I've found that the best way for me to solve the hardest challenges was to get away from my PC and walk the dogs or go to sleep (I've literally found the solution for two challenges while falling asleep and they worked the next day).

Also YouTube suggested a video from this channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbNIlppjAuEX4znoulh0Cw about making a calculator using HTML + CSS + JS. I've spent some time on it and found that I know HTML & CSS, but not enough JS for this yet. Nevertheless it was very satsifying to see a (even not working) calculator with a nice design and clickable buttons made by myself :) Probably sounds funny, but it really helped me to keep going.

I've started 30 Days of Code challenge on https://www.hackerrank.com/, but again this was a bit more than I could chew for now. Maybe later.

That's all for this post. Let's get to debugging challenges.

Random thoughts of a dev noob #1

Pavel Berlin — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 19:22:05 +0000

Just one thing - I like it very much how FreeCodeCamp learning cycle is organized. I don't know if that's on purpose and maybe it's just me, but it starts very easy and you pass challenge after challenge and feel yourself quite smart and satisfied with yourself...

And then you hit a wall. Nothing works, you don't remember anything helpful from previous lessons and you start to think that you are too dumb, too old, too something else for this. You google, you look up the answer (feeling like a despicable cheater) and still you don't get it. You spend a day with no progress at all and the only thing that keeps you going is a promise to yourself that tomorrow you will definitely sort it out.
Next day it's no better, even worse - you've forgotten some ideas you had the day before. You are desperate... and then it clicks and everything is clear and your future is bright again.

One of the best feelings I've ever had. I'm such drama queen)