Week 1 of #codingjourney

Hello there!

About me

It's my first time sharing a blog post on this platform, so maybe I should introduce myself shortly before sharing my coding journey.

I'm Farida from Baku,Azerbaijan currently living in Germany. Prior to this I have lived in Istanbul (Turkiye), Syracuse (New York) and Brussels (Belgium) for academic and work reasons. I have 7 years of professional experience working in a financial industry and more than 5 years of building tech communities.

My curiosity into programming started back in 2016 when I started learning Swift. However, with my studies, work and family duties I couldn't manage my time to keep my learning constant. In 2019 I got introduced to Flutter and started doing some coding challenges thanks to the great flutter community events. Just when I thought I should deep dive into learning Mobile Development, I got the news of relocating to Germany. Just when I thought it would be a piece of cake, I realised that living your favourite city (Istanbul) where you lived for 10 years was not easy at all.I left my job in Istanbul without plan B, just to come to a surprise job offer from Shopify. I became Developer Events Specialist for EMEA. I must say I finally felt like in my "habitat" while working with Engineering Teams and bringing in Marketing and Communications skills to create visibility.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I found myself in the list of thousand people who got impacted by the company's layoffs due to downsizing. Yes, it was not what I planned but it happened at the time when I was thinking of continuing my education in programming and UX Design. I loved working with Developer Communities but I also have a great eye for details and beauty. I love solving problems but I also love being creative. So I thought, why not study both?

I first invested time and money into learning UX Design. I had my knowledge and skills from Psychology, Business, Arts and Marketing which could be transferrable to UX Design. As I continued studying, I fell in love with experience and interaction design. I loved learning more about the psychology behind designing a website or an app that fits well for users needs. Now I have 2 more months left to complete my projects and enter an exam in order to get my diploma.

While I am coming to an end of my UX Design Program, I also decided to seriously commit into learning frontend web development. So now we can switch to my coding journey.

Week 1

One week ago exactly, I decided to start a Frontend Engineer Career Path with Codecademy. I was already familiar with many great sources (due to my previous learning trials). However, this time I wanted to try Codecademy. I signed up for the Pro Membership trial and for a week every single day I spent at least 2 hours on course.

At the end of one week I already was feeling more confident about the course and my learning journey. The teaching method fit well with my learning style, so I decided to continue with the Pro Membership. Lucky me, Codecademy announced 50% discount code available for 2 days. I, ofcourse, did not lose the opportunity and got registered for a 1 year membership. Yes it's a long way, but hey I'm a lifelong learner after all.

I wasn't too keen to share my learning journey, but I received great support from my friends, family and communities to share my progress and document my work for future. I got convinced immediately, ahahah. And so I shared my first tweet

So far I have completed the fundamentals of HTML and CSS on Codecademy. The course is going well and I'm really enjoying my learning journey. It's very challenging when the course doesn't meet your needs or just doesn't fit your learning pace and style. So I'm really glad that this time I started with a path that has been exciting to learn.

I know it's still to early to discuss about the progress overall, but I want to mention what has been working well for me so far.

Consistency.

I may not be working at the moment, but I am studying UX Design Diploma Program, German language (due to new location), family responsibilities (we have a daughter to take care of), driving courses (I had to start over due to German laws) and meanwhile learning frontend web development. Let's not forget that I also need some rest and want to read books (yes I'm a human too). So while doing all of this, most of the time I am really exhausted and barely have any energy to do ANYTHING. However, as I really enjoyed the course on Codecademy, I set a time on my Google Calendar for daily learning. I push myself everyday to spend at least one hour even if I am super tired and just want to go to bed. This discipline and consistency has been working well so far, because oh hey I'm on Day 9 of my #codingjourney.

So if you also want to get inspired by my daily learning journey, feel free to follow me on X .

For now,
Cheers