Just yesterday I completed the learn Javascript course offered on Scrimba. The end of the course encouraged me to write a blogpost to be able to get some of my thoughts out there regarding the course and my progress so far. When I finally reached the last scrim I felt a rush of accomplishment but after a day I feel a bit lost. I figured I would use this blogpost to recap my journey up to this point, and who knows? Maybe I will keep posting about the specifics that brought me here.
For the last 6 months I have slowly been teaching myself the fundamentals of coding and web development. Following a recommendation I started on The Odin Project's - Foundations course. After the extremely encouraging introduction (it seems most free courses start off being insanely motivational) I jumped in head first. Then I set up Ubuntu via a virtual box (!!!) and was introduced to Git / GitHub. Finally, I started learning about HTML, CSS and FlexBox.
I was shocked at how much I was learning at first and how this course was run. I was constantly being directed to different YouTube videos, web-based tutorials/articles and eventually SCRIMBA. The entire concept of SCRIMBA blew my freakin mind. A video that you could pause and literally rewrite and interact with code in real time? Even now I have almost no idea how they pulled this off but I was instantly hooked.
I felt like I was cheating myself by not continuing through The Odin Project's - JavaScript Basics part of their foundations course but after working with SCRIMBA, The Odin Project just felt so dry. I was overwhelmed with constant information from The Odin Project where-as with SCRIMBA I was learning by doing which is my forte.
Everything about the SCRIMBA course was a win for me, plus the "teachers" were helpful, constantly encouraging and entertaining. Big shout out to Per Harold Borgen! I don't even have to look up his name at this point based on how many time's I saw it through examples in the course. But anyway lets move on to the projects and lessons themselves.
It started with a simple "passenger counter", which was legit just a button that would increment by 1 when pressed, to a VERY basic Blackjack game, which honestly did leave a lot to be desired, and eventually lead to a "Shopping List" - mobile app. Throughout this course I was more focused on the creation of the apps themselves that I didn't realize how much I was actually learning! I can now actually pretty accurately tell you what a For Loop is and what it can be used for. I understand functions and objects and the difference between Let and Const variables. I can make the basic skeleton to a working calculator from scratch just for shits and giggles and I have!
That being said, there are still an embarrassing number of things I just learned in the final part of this course that I don't have a good grasp on yet. How importing and exporting works, how to tell what are the actual functions in any file you are importing from, how to actually work with a database, etc... And although I don't have a great idea of what these things are or how they work, I am pretty darn confident that I will have a better understanding soon. If this whole process has taught me anything it's that it just takes practice.
I do realize that I haven't really touched on the SCRIMBA course itself as much as would be implied by the title of this post...but hey, its my first post and I'm excited to get some thoughts out there for the first time. I really do hope I stick with posting on here so I can see my progress from this point on, plus I am a bit lacking on the social aspect of learning coding as well as being part of the larger community.
If someone was to suggest a year ago that I would be running Ubuntu via a virtual box on my outdated laptop so I can properly start coding I wouldn't have believed them. Now I have my first "app" on my phones home screen and I am still in disbelief that I made it to this point. Now I am looking forward to making something silly for myself and then tackling TypeScript and REACT after that. Please feel free to reach out with any questions about my time spent with The Odin Project, SCRIMBA or coding in general!
Top comments (2)
I just finished it the other day! Learned alot as well.
That's awesome and congrats on completing the course! It looks like you followed their instructions and made an account on here too lol. I like the look of your shopping list and I hope you also had fun doing it. What do you plan on tackling next?