Top 5 Mistakes I Made So Far In My Programming Journey

#html #css #react #javascript

There is absolutely no one in this world that's above mistakes, even a group of two or more people with their combined minds makes mistakes.
I'm sharing my top five(5) mistakes I have encountered so far into my programming career as a web developer.
let's dive in;

1. Skipping the basics

After reading so many articles and tweets from developers saying "HTML and CSS aren't programming languages" I had little interests in learning them and only wanted to dive straight into JavaScript not knowing that in order to become a good front_end developer you need a good knowledge on both HTML and CSS.
So after few weeks of HTML, I dived into CSS, one I could add colors of any type to my page I felt I knew all about CSS and I dived straight into JavaScript.
This move affected me in so many ways that I had to go back to learn what I didn't in both HTML and CSS as what's the use of writing good JavaScript without a lovely page to display the actions of the functions. Always learn the basics of things before you move forward, you might not necessarily learn all, but understand the basics.

2. Procrastination

When I started programming, I had several PDFs and tutorial videos to cover but procrastinating was my best friend at this point and i'd say I was extremely lazy. How would I cover all these pages and all these long videos of the same voice explaining something that at the moment seemed impossible to grasp at the moment, so rather than study I'd find some excuses to do something else. I overcame this by reducing the work load on myself and started working in progress, no matter how slow it might be, I just had to keep moving, and I'm glad for where I am today.

3. Doubting Myself

This is hard to say but I wrote my first "Hello World" code back in 2018 i.e. I started learning how to code in 2018. During the last few months of the year and battling with JavaScript and still no success, and I was unable to build any project asides a simple calculator I wrote. I thought to myself, "maybe programming isn't meant for me" but I was wrong, instead of me following peoples tutorials I was trying to proof smart and build my own projects from scratch without YouTube, Googling or even stack overflow, when even senior developers still do these things. After a year in late 2019 I was given some JavaScript quiz by my brother and solving them regenerated my interests in programming, they were quiz that required absolute thinking and it really helped me.

4. Impostor Syndrome

So finally I could write some nice codes, I could build good Apps with nice user's experience and interface using react. But I get to see other peoples work and then start judging myself and thoughts of reverting into mistake number three(3) on this list. This really affected my productivity for months, I'd always be scared to begin a project with fear of not making it the best project. But these days when the impostor syndrome comes, I visit my GitHub repositories, check my first repositories and compare it to the most recent one just to show myself how much I have improved.

5. Lack of Communication

For months of learning and building projects, I mostly stuck to myself and not getting engaged with other developers. I didn't realize how much I was losing until I joined some slacks and twitter developers communities and I saw how much I could learn just buy follow other developers and communicating with them, so many things I never knew existed came into existence, so many advises and insights from experienced developers for free.

If you read this article, and haven't made any of these mistakes yet, it'll be advisable to avoid them, yes! no one is above mistakes, but you should be above the mistakes you're aware of.