Hi! I've been learning web programming on my own for almost a year. It has been a very interesting journey, filled with ups and downs, especially because I didn't know where to start and wandered around for a long time.
Now, I finally feel like I'm on the right track and this makes me very happy, however, I do feel a bit lonely. I really want to be part of a community where I can share my thoughts and insecurities about being a self-learner. And most importantly, interact with others that are going through the same.
Recently I completed the Responsive Web Design Certification on freeCodeCamp and I'm currently on the JavaScript one.
I hope I can meet some new people here :)
Top comments (67)
Welcome!
First: It’s awesome that you been teaching it by yourself. There are many great sources of information and it can be quite overwhelming. FCC is a great place to start. Great job.
Second: Super good idea to reach out to connect with other beginners. Finding people to talk about development, code but also life is very valuable.
Never stop learning!
Thank you for your kind words, it means a lot to me. Yes, I truly think interacting with other people will help me boost my learning process and it also feels great to be part of a community
Totally. One thing is reading, studying and learning by yourself but to have fellow developers to discuss problems, concepts and ideas with.
I’ve work quite a lot as the only front end/UX developer and having a community to bounce of has helped me a lot.
I agree and it's actually a very interesting topic.
Nowadays being able to learn things on your own is a great skill but most people don't mention how lonely it can get, that is why I really appreciate platforms like this.
Hey Maru, I've been checking the projects on your second post. Very inspiring. I'm a beginner myself and just like you I'm looking for other developers to connect, share and go through this journey together. I'd love to chat if you're interested. Saludos desde Colombia.
Hola Karen! Thank you for checking my post about the projects I built.
And sure! Let's chat ☺️
I'm always looking for ideas and your post was of great help.
Where could I contact you?
Send me a DM on Twitter @marulucenat 👋
I followed you but there's not an option to DM you 🤔
Whoops, currently fixing that
Hello and Welcome, I am Pachi!
I used to be a junior web developer and now I work with developer relations, but I consider myself a beginner in programming.
I was in the same spot you are 1 year ago.
Let's connect :)
Hi Pachi, nice to meet you! Thank you so much for your comment, I would love to connect with you :)
Welcome! Great to meet you! dev.to and community.codenewbie.org are great communities to share your journey and read about the journeys of others. I look forward to hearing about your experience with programming!
That's awesome!! Thank you, I really appreciate it.
Hi Court! Thank you for sharing your experience with me, it's always interesting to learn how others discovered their love for coding.
I will be reading your blog post and definitely check Code First Girls 💙
Hi Maru, congrats on the Responsive Web Design Certification. I'm at the same site doing the same thing. On the cusp of getting my Responsive Certification too. This site is a great way to connect with like minded. It also offers more in the way of challenges. There's a thread about learning javascript (I think the basic fundamentals of it) in 30 days. Try the tag #javascript
Hi! It's been great to connect with other students at freeCodeCamp. Good luck with the projects, they are really fun 😊 I would love to check them out
Have like 50 or so lessons left in CSS 3, then the 4 things for my Responsive web cert. Am going to refresh from HTML 5 just to utilize all I've learned.
Correction 5 projects!
Hi Maru! DEV is a great place for you! We're happy you're here. I also invite you to check out the dedicated CodeNewbie Community — a home for early-career programmers and people learning to code ❤️
Well, you're definitely in the right place. Plenty of communities for all kinds and shapes of development. Backend, front-end, pragmatic, academic :)
By the way, how is the development market in Chile?
Thanks! I'm glad I found it.
I've seen a lot of job offerings here for developers, however most of them ask for 5+ years of experience which is a bit frustrating. Also, I've mostly seen opportunities for Back-End devs but maybe I'm not looking properly.
You are already going towards certificates which is a good thing, adding a portfolio will be a great help. A tip for searching jobs, it might sound very naive, but try to figure out the name of the role you want. Some total, might be irrelevant guesses, junior web developer, web developer trainee or junior frontend developer, anor use the filters available like experience on various sites like stack overflow jobs, Google jobs , Glassdoor, angel.co, remote work, and LinkedIn.
I hope you find something you like.
Oh that is something I'm struggling with, defining my role(s). Mostly because I would like to include other skills I have but still make my resume related to IT, it's like I can't seen to find the correct words...
Hello Maru! i'm also new to this dev.to community
been coding for a great 7 years but i'm all alone that 7 years.
been learning so many programming and ended up becoming laravel fullstack developer now.
nice to know you! :)
ps : Good luck on your journey! because learning something in web programming is never ended :D
Hey @Maru, Nimit this side. Starting to code and not finding a team or group of people equally invested in developing something sometimes makes you lonely and demotivates you a lot. I understand this because I go through this every day. But now since I've got a community of hack club nuv where share hacks and makes things together. If you feel lonely while adding scripts to your HTML file, ping me I'll send you the discord link.
Thank you for the recommendation, I'm happy you found a community!🙌
Hello and welcome to programming, I can completely relate to what you felt in the beginning because of so much information/guides out there , telling you what's important and what not.
FreeCodeCamp is a great place to start, I see you did we design and you are moving towards js, which signals you might be interested in web development. I will not say frontend or backend because you haven't fully tried it yet.
One thing that helped me aquire relevant skills, confidence while having fun and continuous motivation was thinking about what I want to make. Trying to make something that you can show to others will means you'll want it to be completed.
I wanted to make a website when I started to share some content with friends, I did html and css but it didn't look good on mobile and that told me about css percentage width, when that started failing, I learned media queries. I would have never learned media queries or remembered them if it wasn't for the website. I just wanted it to look good on mobile.
So I would advice you to think of something simple that you will love to make and share with friends , or share with us. While you make it you'll automatically figure out what you need to learn and what is not relevant at the point. When you face a problem, always remember, you might not be the first one to face this problem, someone else might have faced it too, so there must be questions and answers all over the web, you just need to search and you will find many solutions and one will work for you.
This also will validate your learnings, make a portfolio which will be a plus during interviews and having something tangible, usable out there will be worth all the hard work and late nights you spent finishing it. There is no rush in the beginning, enjoy it , you don't even need to remember everything by heart but just the times when it will be useful and then you can just search the syntax or implementation.
So congratulations on starting, completing a certificate and finding your path.
Congratulations on joining dev and posting here, and best of luck for all the things you make in future. I can't wait to see what you post here.
Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment and for sharing your experience with me.
I can relate to what you say about building something you like and showing it to friends and family, it is very exciting to finish a project, seeing how others interact with it and receiving feedback. And yes! While building something you learn a lot, especially when you try to be creative and don't know how to make your idea come to life 😅
Again, thank you for your recommendations, I hope you have a good day!
Edit: I posted my experience on building projects, it would be nice if you could check it out :) dev.to/marulucenat/working-on-my-f...
You're in the right place! DEV is super beginner friendly, and there are many folks here who are self taught.
Thank you! I'm very happy to be here :)
Welcome to the community Maru! I was in a similar position to you a month ago. I have been learning for the past year and recently started reaching out to others and engaging with the community and it has been great 😃. The learner developer community on Twitter is great with people helping and encouraging each other. Check out the #100DaysOfCode. Good luck with your journey!
Thank you for sharing your experience with me! It's great to know there is also a great community on Twitter, I will check it out 🤓
Yeah I have also realized that being in a community is great, you just share when u get stuck and people are always helping each other .
And as you are using freecodecamp I just found out their discord server :
discord.gg/KVUmVXA .
Welcome to DEV - if you're after community you're in the right place; there are people from all different backgrounds, skill levels and parts of the world - all with different interests but largely with the same mindset of wanting to learn, grow, help each other and ultimately make cool stuff!
Congrats on completing the certification and all the best for the future.
Thanks a lot! I truly feel like I'm on the right place 🤓
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.