Recently I have decided to take my learning of Front End Development seriously. I wanted to step my skills up to the next level and prepare myself for a career transition. Learning Front End Development has been quite an experience with treehouse, but its two different things when you watch a video follow along and copy what you saw then implementing and playing around to build a site based on the skills you learned–it sticks with you more.
So, I decided to take a new approach to really getting a good understanding and grasp the concepts I learned. Why not implement the techniques into personal projects and just dive into the practices I learned. Therefore I began building different web concepts. I first began by keeping it simple and follow along the same template with the tutorials I watched. After I created and “copied” the template, I began to look up other templates online and see if I could mimic what I saw with only the skills I learned with HTML and CSS.
This led me to not only being creative but learning a deeper understanding of the type selectors, class selectors, elements, properties and functions in order to mimic another site. Not only that, but I began to learn how to really use the developers tools to look at other developer’s source code and how they might of approached their design as well implementing some of the design they used.
The greatest part about this is I’m also learning how to read other developers code as well as figure out how a site was created even which platform it was created on.
Honestly as I dive deeper into this path of a front end web developer I find it gratifying because I enjoy learning how things work or how their built and this gives me a peek into the behind the scenes. Doing this I can apply all these skills to my own designs even mixing and matching styles to create my own custom designs. It even helps me to learn how to pay attention to details in order to find errors and debugging them.
Since I decided to focus on one thing for the rest of this year, Front End Web Development, which you can read about it here. It’s been much easier to navigate what I need to do to learn and create to build my arsenal of skills on. I mean I decided to stop a lot of things and giving up my time to watching TV, movies, and going out in order to spend the majority of my time learning and building my skills in web development.
Don’t get me wrong I do get tired especially when I get stuck when the code isn’t doing what I want it to. In those moments instead of taking a break to watch tv and lose the momentum I step away either just for a break, not watching anything, but either listening to music or just simply rest because sometimes it might be late and I just need some sleep. However, the next day or a few moments later I will get right back to it because sometimes the solution will come to me in the break. Even when I’m not coding I’m reading books on front end in order to keep my focus on the subject.
Ive learned that in those moments when it gets hard and you don’t want to do something you push past that feeling and just do it. Its easier to be distracted than to focus on the problem till its finished. This is where discipline plays a great role. Like nike in the moments when you don’t want to do something or don’t feel like it, just do it. That’ what makes success from failure.
This deep focus has been truly beneficial to my learning because doing practical exercises and fun projects is evident. Not only can I see my progress but my self worth and value is important to me and growing these skills feels like I am able to make a contribution not only to my life but to the marketplace.
I heard this talk from a podcast from learntocodewith.me and this talk with Alexander Kallaway about the challenge of coding for #100daysofcode. I have been subconsciously taking on that challenge everyday with the intention of coding in some capacity. Overall this process and journey has been a fun one and I can’t wait till I’m fully immersed in the field and surrounded by other like minded people like me.