Welcome to the world of JS and Free Code Camp!!! I started right when FCC was brand new and was only a curated curriculum. In otherwords, FCC linked to other sites that had coding lessons, and FCC helped you track your progress and provide a guided learning pathway.
What I found back then was that
- I needed to repeat lessons I had just done
- I used muiltiple sites to reinforce what I had just learned
- I wrote a parallel project to the ones in the lesson to make sure I could abstract the concepts.
I’m not sure what your background is in education, but there are a lot of ideas out there that apply to any thing you’re trying to get better at.
Kaizen is a japanese term for continual improvement. It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner, intermediate or expert, there is always someplace you can improve. Some tennets of improving are:
-You need a blueprint of what you’re trying to do. Code tutorials and lessons here provide a blue print
-You need to break things down into small managable pieces. (Code tutorials do this for you…as you make progress you can take 2 ideas from a code tutorial and create your own idea. eg how to create a random number & how to create an array of strings. Combine these ideas and you can create random quotes…assuming quotes are what you stored in the array
-You need objective feedback on how you’re doing. The tests in FCC provide feedback on whether you’re correct or incorrect. The forums can hep provide feedback on your thinking process.
-You need to reapply what you just got feedback on to see if you can do it better.
As long as you’re generally following these steps, you’ll make continual improvement.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not meeting someone else’s objectives for progress…what matters is if YOU are making progress.
Keep in mind that finding mistakes and errors are how you identify what you need to improve upon.
Maybe you can’t recall the syntax for making a random number. This is a memorization/repetition issue. So make notes, or notecards and review your notecards during breaks at work.
Those are just some simple ideas, but meant to provide encouragement. Keep it up.
As you make progress what seems abstract now will beome more concrete.
Maybe take some example from your field. YOu said you have a blue collar background, so think of some process that you do in your job. Just making this up, but say you are a welder…you need to do things in a specific order to make a good weld. Or you need to make choices about your materials, rod size, etc before you weld. Or there is a series of safety steps (turn gas on, put mask on, etc).
With somethign you know really well in mind, think of how what you just learned and try to apply it. At first it’s super simple…
-print a list of steps to the screen
-store the steps in an array
-let a user interact with the steps, like “click here when done”.
Hope that helps. You got this!
You got this.