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Discussion on: Am I Smart Enough?

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lionelrowe profile image
lionel-rowe • Edited

Prior to deciding I wanted to be a software engineer, I was a fashion designer, real estate photographer, grocery store cash office clerk, etc etc. Name a career/study path and most likely I've considered studying it or actually and started just never finished.

Hard relate! I've been a teacher, translator, and tech writer before transitioning to software development. One of these days maybe I'll go back to teaching and the circle will be complete 😅

specifically focusing on web3 development

TBH I think web3 is a fad. It mostly seems to be startups desperately trying to find an actual use case for blockchain and then using it to "solve" problems where it has no advantage over more conventional tech.

However... Software development in general is a massive field, and even if certain parts of it are overly hype-driven, there are lots of transferable skills you'll be learning.

Over the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on doing projects unrelated to coursework from the bootcamp to see if one of these tutorials will be the key to me understanding coding!

Don't wait for one singular moment of enlightenment. Learning to code is much more of a process of small, incremental "lightbulb moments". Learn a concept, write some code to test that you understood it, try to find the limits of that understanding with the code you write (What happens if I subtract the 1 instead of adding it? My laptop is somehow on fire now? Interesting, I'll make a note to find out why that happened.)

Free-form personal projects are also a great idea, plus you get to build something potentially useful from them!

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marilia profile image
Marilia

A teacher! One of the many career paths I started to study for and just decided it wasn't for me!

I've been focused so much on learning the fundamentals and basics of programming I have completely forgotten that I even wanted to do web3 development in the first place! When I started this bootcamp that was my end goal but I have been kind of looking into so many different things to do as a software engineer (notice a pattern here? haha!)
Maybe later on, if web3 is still a thing, I will shift my focus to it, but for right now I feel like that's just another beat to tackle when I am more experienced.

Learn a concept, write some code to test that you understood it, try to find the limits of that understanding with the code you write (What happens if I subtract the 1 instead of adding it? My laptop is somehow on fire now? Interesting, I'll make a note to find out why that happened.)

Do you have any project ideas for me to try out?
I've been learning JavaScript/HTML/CSS3 the past 3 months through the bootcamp, and Ruby/Ruby On Rails on my own for a month, I know you suggested free-form personal projects but I just don't even know where to begin with those!

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worldwidejamie profile image
Jamie Smith

I subscribed to Frontend Mentor for a while and I really enjoyed it.
It's like you get project briefs with design files and it's up to you to create the project.
They progress from easy to hard. Some only require html & css while the more difficult ones require more complexity and languages.
frontendmentor.io/

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marilia profile image
Marilia

Thank you so much for sharing this link, will definitely check it out

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lionelrowe profile image
lionel-rowe

Mine tend to relate to my other interests, usually around language-learning or linguistics, e.g.

As you have a background in fashion, you could try something around that, e.g.

  • A portfolio site for your designs
  • Fashion-focused e-commerce site
  • Drag-and-drop wardrobe
  • Generating a color pallette from an image
  • Using AI to generate a color pallette based on mood or keywords
  • Augmented-reality "try it on" tool

Roughly in ascending order of difficulty — the last 2 would probably take a long time and require a lot of research but you'd learn a ton!