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Brendon
Brendon

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Beginning a new Journey

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Hello world! This is the very first blog I have ever created before, but felt I am now at a point in my learning progress as a Software Developer, that I should share my accomplishments and projects as I go. Ideally to highlight the things I am feeling and main factors I have learned while finishing a project.

I completed a Software Engineer Full-Stack Immersive boot camp this last year through Thinkful, which let me tell you was no easy task!!! Talk about drinking from the firehose for 6 months straight every day! Although I enjoyed what I learned and am very grateful for the education I obtained, I felt like the program was a lot of waterskiing over topics, rather than scuba diving into anything to master it before moving on to another subject. By the end of the program, I felt I was introduced at best to a lot of everything. Sadly though, I did not feel job ready by any means.

After graduation, I needed a small break to get over the burn-out that I experienced, and then start afresh. This time however, I now had the tools I needed to teach myself what I wanted to learn in greater detail. I started by re-doing the entire Thinkful curriculum over again at my own pace, and then moved forward from there.

There are a ton of great resources online that are usually free, but I also enrolled into a few great programs given by instructors. The main ones I focused on was a program instructor named Mosh Hamedani, Udemy courses, Pluralsight courses, free courses on LinkedIn, and my personal favorite, Scrimba! Getting education from all these resources and more helped me develop my skills in multiple ways.

I decided to start my focus with Front-End Development and go from there. My time has been dedicated to HTML, CSS, JavaScript and React. Of course there were a lot of other skills I have picked up as well along the way. Submitting work to github, node.js, git, Figma, Photoshop, Netlify, etc. for example. But for this first blog, I wanted to show off a solo project I created.

Now that I am at a point where I feel confident enough to make things and present them, this blog is dedicated to me creating a Unit Converter. This project includes HTML/CSS and JavaScript in order to convert a number from Metric to Imperial units, and also Imperial to Metric Units. Implemented design and functionality from the ground up. Uses manipulation of the DOM and calculations of math and rounding to 3 decimal places.

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https://jacksondynamics.github.io/UnitConverter/

The main things I learned in this project are implementing css principles more fully (including flexbox), using JavaScript in multiple ways for the calculations needed and functionality, and basic HTML bare bones, while also implementing id's, classes, and elements, and ways to manipulate the DOM as the user interacts with it.

All in all, I feel REALLY GREAT AND PROUD of how far I have come!!! Hence why I am now here and sharing it with the world! I feel like I will continue to record my successes as I go and perhaps somehow, give back to the community that has also been here to support me.

Thanks greatly!!!

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