Please don’t take this the wrong way. I have read most of your recent posts on various topics
& I would put money on the fact that the real reason you are asking ALL of them is:
FEAR!
What if you can’t do it, what if you look stupid asking questions?
What if you still look stupid even after asking a bunch of questions & still doing understand something?
What if you complete the cert & don’t get a job right away? What will your friends
& family say if you get to 30 & don’t have a career?
Well, the advice that finally got me off my butt was this:
“You’ll be that (in my case more than double your) age whether or not you do it, so you may as well do it now, or you’ll be starting it then.”
Use CodePen, use Notepad, use anything including scratch paper if you have to!
Your profile shows you have not done anything in over a month.
Believe it or not, by the time you get a job you will have used so many tools you won’t even list them all on your resume. What you start with as a beginner should be whatever is quickest & easiest & gets you CODING! Codepen is useful for showing things off when you don’t want the hassle of figuring out how to host it even as a pro, so its not a waste to use it. Yes, there are other tools you will learn about eventually that do the same thing, but they have take longer to learn to use & right now you need to focus on coding, not learning yet another tool. You WILL know when it is time to move off Codepen to you next tool/IDE.
You have the rest of your life to figure out how to use Atom, Sublime, Brackets or whatever. By theny some other tool will be the in thing-- it always is.
Any & all are good options, but as complete newbie–the important thing is to see & mess around with code: copy the tutorial BY hand. Get them to work, then mess around with them, break them, change them to do something a little different, until you understand what every line you typed does.
What tool you use is irrelevant until you have the self confidence to start downloading & installing a boatload of software & that can certainly wait a month or two or even more for someone who has never coded before.
Don’t let the choice of a tool keep you from starting in the browser with the tools designed to get you started NOW! Yes those tools are there exactly for this reason-- so you can learn to code without the headache of 5 hours of installation nightmares before you get to code your first line. There is some sort of perverse pleasure in forcing people to have such an experience, but all the coding bootcamps have come to realize if you want people to START coding, making it a painful start is not the way to succeed.
If you are spending this long trying to get through a Udemy course then the alternate perspective of doing FCC will help the light bulb go on & give you a nice change of pace, helping speed both along. For example, if you have done HTML & CSS on Udemy, then come & do them on FCC, then go back & do the next topic on Udemy & then FCC (or the reverse). It may take you a bit longer but the perspective of two explanations of the same topic is usually helpful as one often fills in things the other skims over.
Just DO something on BOTH every day.
If you can’t do an hour a day, do 20 minutes
or even 10
or even 5 minutes, but
do SOMETHING other than forums–every day.
(BTW I am talking to my self here too & juggling 5 or 6 courses.)
Start at the beginning & go straight through, skip around, follow a ouija through the curriculum or P1xt’s program, but do something–anything–other than forums & chat on FCC–
–every day.
If you never start, then yes- you never will get a job.
But even the tiniest accomplishment of ONE screen challenge a day
will eventually & totally change your view of yourself & what you can do.
(Have you ever watched ants work? One grain at a time, until “suddenly” there a huge pile.)
THEN, when you get stuck, bored or need a new push, use the chat inside FCC
& get though help with it.
THEN, come back here to help & encourage the next person behind you who is doing
what you just overcame, just to talk to us, & to tell us how awesome you are doing.
Looking forward to seeing that post soon!
Maybe even before the new year!! Give it a try!