How it started
After learning some basic Python from my uncle, I wanted to build something interactive. So, I decided to make a playable tic-tac-toe game in the VS Code terminal. After brainstorming and writing code for a few hours, I finally completed a tic-tac-toe game that works by showing a 3x3 matrix where the player enters the row number, column number and then X or O.
Figure 1: My tic-tac-toe running in the VS Code terminal
When I got to play a working tic-tac-toe in my terminal, I felt a dopamine rush that beat scrolling reels.
The Pac-Man code that scared me
After a month of making tic-tac-toe, my college began, and I started learning Python and the basics of computer science through it. With my brief knowledge of Python and some spare time, I started exploring what I could do in CS, and web dev felt most familiar because I use websites every day and knew some apps are just websites, known as web apps. Since these were the first weeks of college, I procrastinated. Every day I felt guilty about procrastinating, but I ignored it. A few weeks before my mid-sem exams, I started trying to understand how a website works to stop the guilt, so I generated a playable Pac-Man game in the browser using GLM 5.3 Flash and asked it to explain the code to me.
Figure 2: Pac-Man generated by GLM 5.3 Flash
The code felt alien. I didn't understand how the HTML, CSS and JS are connected, what the JS file does and how the logic works. It felt so overwhelming that I discarded this idea and postponed it until after my exams.
What changed with Scrimba
After my mid-sem exams, I started going through YouTube to learn web dev. I came across Scrimba's full-stack web dev course on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.
Figure 3: Scrimba's Full stack Web Developer course
I chose it because it's interactive. As I went through it, I found it very hands-on. The solo projects at the end of every major section made me appreciate Scrimba even more. For example, one of the projects in the course is a counter app that teaches how to render changes on the website through JS, which I used to count the clothes I give to the laundry.
Figure 4: The counter app I now use for laundry
While building the counter, the webpage wasn't updating the count because the ID names in the HTML and JS didn't match, which I found out after rereading the code multiple times. Mistakes like this are what coding along teaches you to spot. Scrimba's course made it easier for me to learn, since all the things I needed to learn are consolidated in a single place, so I could stay consistent and avoid tutorial hopping.
What I learned
Throughout this journey, I realised a few things:
- Learning from something small and building on top of it beats taking on something complex when you lack fundamentals.
- Building projects and using them in daily life (for example, using the counter for laundry) is superior to scrolling reels.
- Coding alongside tutorials takes more time, but it builds muscle memory and a far better understanding of the topic.
If you want to learn web dev without tutorial hopping and build your own small projects as you go, I feel Scrimba is one of the best platforms. You can check out Scrimba's website through this referral link.
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