Now I’m nowhere near the Web Developer I want to be, but each week I get a little closer to that goal. There have been a few battles when learning to develop, each challenging in their own right. When I was learning HTML and CSS, I had trouble with positioning elements, who am I kidding, that part can still challenging. The syntax for both were easy to grasp, but it wasn’t until my third or fourth website where I finally felt comfortable. Each site I learn/try something new and it seemed to help me learn faster. Especially if I was trying to do something specific or have a certain look or layout. Eventually I was able to make static websites, now all I needed was some behavior, so naturally JavaScript became the next hurdle to jump.

JavaScript has been a major focus of mine lately; I know it’s a language that any successful frontend developer needs to know. That’s easier said than done, I’ve tried plenty of times to learn, I’ve bought courses on Udemy, watched countless YouTube videos, read books, even subscribed to CodeSchool. With all that learning material, it still wasn’t sticking. When I read about other developers who struggled to learn JavaScript, it made me feel better, but they weren’t sharing how they finally learned. I did come to the realization that I hadn’t been putting what I was learning to use. I finally started to make progress when I got to code and experiment on my own, just like I did with HTML and CSS. I’m still learning JavaScript and I still have to reread documentation a million times, but I finally found what works for me.

My goal is to get better and more confident with JavaScript; I know that being proficient in JavaScript will make it easier to learn the next language. Though I plan on being a Frontend Developer, I still like to know some backend languages like PHP and Ruby. When I was making a site in school, I had to create a contact page. It wasn’t required to make it functional, but it was heavily suggested to look into how to make one work. I did my research and was introduced to PHP, in coding there’s usually more than one way to achieve a goal. After a google search, I saw a plethora of examples. I had no idea what I was doing, I would copy and paste code, but it wouldn’t work. I finally stumbled on a YouTube video that was simple for me to implement in my page. Success! I was the only one in class with a functioning contact page, it felt great. I want to revisit PHP after JavaScript so I can really understand what I was doing, it’ll be the next language in my crosshairs.

I guess what I’ve learned on my road to becoming a developer, is that the more I actually do, the easier the next thing becomes. Experimenting and manipulating code to make it work has been my process all along. It’s like when I was learning to draw (at a young age), I didn’t get better till I started tracing comic books, it gave me insight into the choices the artist made. I was able to learn perspective and anatomy by tracing, eventually I was able to draw the characters on my own. I think the same applies with coding (at least I hope), eventually I’ll be able to write code on my own without looking at examples. Okay, that’ll probably never happen, but you know what I mean…