Trust Issues
It's now late in 2018 and I have my machine. Now what. Google, YouTube, Reddit, everything you can think of. Quite quickly I learned that there is an amazing amount of information out there. I also learned that sorting through it when you have no idea what you're looking at is really, stupidly hard. This is a common anecdote, but I really was trying to reconcile why some people called it JavaScript while others called it just Java. That's how not in-the-know I was.
Video by video, article by article, I was finally able to figure out what front end and back end referred to; that Java and JavaScript were not the same thing. And while some issues were straightened out, others emerged. Learn Angular! Wait, no maybe React? Relational databases are the standard, but you have to know MongoDB to be marketable. HTML sucks so you should just use Pug or Handlebars. CSS is stupid and confusing, just use Sass. Have we mentioned React yet?
Alright, I found information... now which information can I trust?
Developers come to different conclusions here; I recognize and respect that. Here's what it boiled down to for me: trust the people and organizations who stress and teach the basics, then decide where to go from there.
Very early on I knew that front end was where I wanted to be. I began seeing freeCodeCamp, Codecademy, bento, and even Treehouse (this was pre-2021 layoffs). I finally discovered MDN. And then I was off.
In retrospect, this was the correct path for me (and, I suspect, for many coders around my time and in current time). Trust the foundational information. I hammer this when I mentor new developers. If you can write an interactive, accessible, functional website with just index.html, styles.css, and main.js, everything else will be icing on the cake. And good employers will recognize that.
It wasn't just articles, learning platforms, and YouTube video though! Podcasts became by escape. If I had bashed my head into the keyboard for several hours trying to do the freeCodeCamp Intermediate Algorithms one after the other, I would close the laptop and find somewhere to chill down with a podcast. Syntax.fm, CodeNewbie, JavaScript Jabber, JS Party; I could list quite a few more. Combining all of those resources to make learning both passive and active was an extremely powerful approach.
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