Initial thoughts
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." Ancient Chinese proverb
Since the beginning of my last academic year at university, I decided to dedicate myself
fully to learn how to code. This is something I have wanted be able to do since I was a teenager, but I
had always let my impatience for learning difficult things, and lack of technical skills hold me back. The
process of beginning to learn something completely new can be very intimidating.
At the beginning of learning any new skill, you feel humbled by the seemingly mountainous task of knowledge
you must obtain and walls you must break through, before you even have a
basic understanding of what goes into it. I mean, people get university degrees to do this right? Well,
after being curious about coding for the past few years, I decided it was time
to dive in. What I found was almost instantly a new great passion.
This has very much been a learn-as-you-go journey so far. It has been one of the steepest learning curves
I've ever experienced, and every single day I seem to learn something
new that takes my understanding of the subject to a whole new level. I started with a tutorial on Python,
tried to understand as much as possible there, and from there have
moved on to the next seemingly logical steps, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have tried to create as much on my
own as possible, especially this website you are reading now.
When struck by a new passion, it can be easy to rush into different areas and go where the wind takes you.
One of the biggest challenges seems to be to simply trust
the process I have started on. Knowing that great things take time, accepting the opportunities that arise,
the challenges that come with them, and having the patience to wait for progress.
The first published project I'm working on is this website. After publishing the repository on Github I
hosted the website through Github Pages, which seems to do just fine for my hosting
purposes as for now. I will most likely change this later. Follow the link for source code (opens in new
tab).
One of the first tutorial project in Python I was able to add and modify a few things myself. One of the
changes was creating a batch file that would automatically run the script on startup.
Learned a lot from doing this. Ran into several problems, but it seems like every time I learn something
new, I can come back to this program and improve on something.
Through freecodecamp's coding curriculum
I've completed several projects as part of their responsive web design course. These have been published
on my Codepen profile, where they are showcased with HTML and CSS code easily available. To date, I've
created a tribute page, survey form, a portfolio, technical documentation site and a product landing page.
These websites were each created in one sitting, and is simply meant to showcase different abilities.
This is a simple color flipper. This was my first JavaScript project. Here, I learned about concepts like
getElementById, querySelector, addEventListener. These I will be able to use more freely going forward, when
working with JavaScript.
A super simple counter project. Just made to get some experience with if statements in JavaScript.
A project I built in Python to automatically type out tweets from a text document. The program runs until
there are no more lines in the document. The script uses a webdriver to access the website and log into the
account, and the package pyautogui to assist with filling in each tweet.
As of late (06.02.2021), I have focused on improving my DOM manipulation skills in Vanilla JS, and also
getting some experience in working with APIs from different websites. For every time I would learn something
new I would try to implement it in some way in a new web app, or section of this website. It feels
incredibly rewarding to see myself improving in this particular part of my web development journey, and I
look forward to the day where I look back upon this project and laugh at how basic, or inefficient I've
implemented the code.