HTML & CSS - My Journey

I started my software development journey on 1st December 2020 as a student at Frond-End Masters an online Bootcamp. When I began this journey, I aspired to become a full-stack web developer. It has been two months since I embarked on this journey and although there have been some setbacks, I can say it has been fun and worth it. All the setbacks I have encountered have made me learn a lot of new stuff. I decided to document my journey since in the short time I have was learning have been seen a lot of success stories and I felt like I had to also share my journey. To do this I plan to be writing and posting an article in every two weeks covering what I have been learning and working on during this period. This article won’t just cover the stuff I build but the challenges I went through, how I overcame them and the experience I gained.

When I set out to be a full-stack web developer, I did some research before starting my classes and discovered it is divided into two categories:

1. Front-end web development - A front-end web developer is responsible for implementing visual elements that users see and interact with within a web application.
2. Back-end web development - They are responsible for server-side application logic and integration of the work front-end developers do.

To actualize my goal of becoming a full-stack web developer, I had to start by learning the front-end bit and becoming a front-end developer. Front-end development requires one to have a foundation in the following front-end skills:

• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language; creates the content of a webpage.
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets; describes the style of a webpage.
• JavaScript: A programming language used to describe a web page's behavior.
• CodePen: An online code editor for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript where users can highlight their work and get it debugged.

It took me a week to learn practice and fully understand HTML. After that, I immediately started my CSS course where I spent a month and three weeks learning and practicing. I wanted to take time and care to learn and understand CSS properties and their uses. Using this approach made my learning process fun and enabled me to learn a lot of new things. So far, I have fully learned HTML and CSS and I’m currently learning JavaScript and I have built my portfolio as my first project.

Throughout my journey of learning, I have encountered some challenges, but the major challenges encountered have been balancing my schoolwork and my Bootcamp work and maintaining consistency in my learning process. I overcame these challenges by creating my schedule where I would have time allocated for attending to my schoolwork and sometimes allocated to learn in my Bootcamp course. At first, it was hard, but once I got used to it keeping to a schedule became easy. The biggest thing I have learned out of it is that the pain of disciple lasts for a short time and with proper utilization of my time I can achieve everything I have set my mind towards. I also started documenting my daily progress of learning JavaScript on Twitter to ensure that I’m consistent in my learning process and so far, I can proudly say I have been consistent in my learning and that it has had a lot of benefits. If you made it to the end of the post thank you for reading it through. And I look forward to sharing my journey as I go along.