Tag: Journal

131 days ago I started my journey to learn web development. What initially began as a tentative foray into investigating possible employment paths apart from my current career quickly evolved to a love of solving problems and an insatiable desire to learn more. I didn’t code every day, and there were a couple periods of barrenness, yet here I am---much farther along my development journey than when I first started. In the past 131 days I have gone from practically no coding experience to almost completing the front-end certification from Free Code Camp. I have created projects with more complex logic, including my first project in React, and continue to grow at a steady pace. I decided to join the 100 Days of Code challenge for a couple…

My journey into web development is still in it’s infancy. I started the Free Code Camp program on March 29, 2017 and hit the ground running in search of something more fulfilling than my current day job. I still have a lot more to learn, but enter each day ready to assimilate more information. Prior to that eventful first day two months ago, I did not have much coding or programming experience; I had a basic understanding of HTML from a computer science class 16 years ago, but CSS and Javascript were beyond intimidating. I started unsure of how I would adapt to this venture into a skillset which I had zero preparation for. To my pleasant surprise, I have taken to it well and faster than anticipated. The notion of “imposter syndrome" hit me…

After much debugging and chasing of state errors for edge cases of operational order, I have finally concluded the development of my JavaScript calculator, which also happens to be my first React application. The live version of the project can be found here and the code can be found on my GitHub. This particular project stretched me the most thus far for multiple reasons. Learning a new library was definitely complex and took some back and forth researching (more on that later). The primary challenges was handling all of the logic necessary to operate the calculator and then handling a bunch of unexpected cases and order of operations that would break the ideal scenario’s code. Due to the complexity of handling the various states in React…

It is always an exciting day to release a new project into the wild. After a week of active development, and a couple days doing minor tweaks, I’m happy to have my Twitch Viewer project live. This particular project was an interesting development in my skills with Javascript particularly. It was the first time that I dynamically created a Javascript object for a myriad of users based off of data polled from multiple API calls. After finally figuring out the constructor function the rest of the project built out quickly within a couple days. What was the most difficult challenge for me, was dealing with the asynchronous population of the object data, due to the API calls, and when to call the displayUsers function. Initially, I had created a…

It has been an exciting two weeks in my web development journey. I've made a serious dent in the algorithm challenges since completing my Twitch viewer project. So far I have completed 18 challenges, leaving three advanced algorithm challenges between me and starting my advanced front end projects. These last few algorithms are kicking my butt though, as the difficulty between the intermediate and advanced challenges jumped up the parabolic curve. So far my strategy of stepping away from one challenge and moving to another when I get too frustrated has been paying off. Distance and time has led to some of my best breakthrough moments. Forcing it only pisses me off more, as well as weird looks when I mutter expletives at my computer on…