Welcome to the first post of many of "My Journey Into Coding". This series will kind of serve as a dev journal as well as a documentation of the progress I am making as I try to learn what I can to one day get a job as a web developer. I want to start out by saying, I love web development. It's been a passion of mine since I was around 16 or 17. When I was in high school, our computer class let us make projects for a technology fair and my teacher convinced me to enter.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to enter. The year before, I had created a PowerPoint presentation. Somehow my teammate and I managed to get second place at Regional and State. (We got eliminated the second time). I knew I didn't want to do another PowerPoint so I went to my teacher and she suggested I give the website thing a shot. So I did.
I decided I wanted to do a fan page for a band I was really into at the time (and still love to this day) +44. I don't exactly remember what the editor we used was but, I knew I wanted to hard code everything and not do WYSIWYG. I worked on it everyday in class (because at that time, I didn't own a computer) and after hours of hard work, I finally got it done. All hard coded, no CSS (because at the time I didn't know what it was and I didn't have time to learn it), just straight HTML. I would up getting 2nd place at regionals and 3rd place at state. This really ignited my love of web development. (I have it burned to a CD somewhere in my house).
Fast forward 2 years and I wound up making a website for the anime club at my college. Sadly, that site is lost to the sands of time cause the hosting site I used disappeared without a trace.
On top of those 2 instances, I also got big into designing Myspace layouts. All those little things combined made me really want to take the plunge in web development. But, I wound up talking myself out of it because at the time, I wasn't sure if the demand for that would justify me making that my major so I wound up just specializing in general CS.
Now we're at the present. I'm a little wiser now and something has rekindled that initial spark for web development. I started doing research into what skills I would need to learn to hopefully one day be able to get a job as either a front-end or full stack developer. I knew I would need to know the "trifecta languages" (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) but, after that, I had no clue.
So what I decided to do was look into some free resources online and try to find something that would give me a good start that wouldn't be too hard to expand upon. I decided to go with:
- freecodecamp: freecodecamp had a lot of interesting topics on it including "Responsive Web Design", "Front-End Development Libraries", "Databases" and "Coding Interview Prep". So, it had a lot of resources and they were free.
- The Odin Project: This was one that my friend told me about. I haven't done anything on here yet but, it also offers a plethora of content. I was interested in the "Foundations" courses as well as the "Full Stack JavaScript" course. I also liked that they had a "Choose Your Own Path" kind of deal.
- Lastly, during Black Friday, I noticed Udemy was running a sale and I picked up the The Complete 2023 Web Development Bootcamp which also had a TON of information. Topics range from HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node, Express, MongoDB, SQL, and even Git/GitHub.
Currently, I am doing the freecodecamp Responsive web and the Udemy course. While I was looking for what to do, I decided I wanted to tackle a small project and I decided I would look at some tutorials and see what all I could create. Using a video, I was able to make [StreamOS](streamos.kurtissfrost.com] which is a YouTube clone that I tried to add my own flavor to.
So overall, I am really looking forward to continuing my journey into the world of web development. I am going to keep learning as much as I can and try to not only make projects that are in my lessons but, to also try and branch out and make projects with the knowledge I have in the moment. This way I can hopefully avoid "Tutorial Hell" and I can also get practice in actually creating a project from the ground up.
Thank you so much for reading, I hope you all have a wonderful day/night!
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