I took a year off from studying Accounting and Finance to learn programming and this is what I have learned so far…
From hindsight learning wasn’t difficult…where to learn was. There are a lot of resources out there on coding and that didn’t make things any simpler.
The resources I found useful earlier in the process were:
I was fortunate enough to join a Front End development program by General Assembly fully funded. This helped me set the understanding I needed to know how to learn technologies.
Here I learnt about:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- jQuery
Before I learned about the General Assembly program, I took the initiative to book a JavaScript Boot Camp. The Boot Camp focused on building a React app and learning JavaScript through coding challenges. Although, this was taking place at the same time I started learning about JavaScript at General Assembly and to put it shortly, it was overwhelming.
What I discovered during that process was, it is hard to learn JavaScript Frameworks without understanding how JavaScript works.
I ended up missing half of the classes at the Boot Camp because I just had to learn fundamentals first. I stayed away from learning React for while instead practiced DOM Manipulation, using jQuery and writing Vanilla JavaScript. The resources I listed above really helped during this process, I can also add Codecademy to that list too.
While I was learning, I was unsettled because I didn’t know how to use these new tools, but after communicating with mentors and reflecting back, I didn’t need to know these tools just yet, but I can be aware of them. I was biting off more than I could chew.
Morale of the story here is focus, focus, focus on learning the fundamentals, everything else will come along later. One thing at a time, don’t try and learn too much or you’ll end up knowing a lot about nothing. One at a time.
