Code Camp Journal

Career Advice
1

Hi all, nice to meet you.

I think better out loud, so I’ll be keeping a journal here of what I’m thinking and doing. I’m feeling about 95% sure about programming as a career change (but that’s happened before where I was wrong). My gut can veto before Wednesday morning, after that I have to make the call and stick with it come hell or high water.

I’m sitting on about 10 months’ worth of bills in my bank account, which puts me in a very good position to learn what I’m doing full-time. At 32, I flatter myself to believe I know more or less how this bundle of guts operates. Conservatively, I’d like to be paying bills again from an income by the end of January.

Initial goal is to finish the front-end certification course by the end of Friday. Off I go!

Updates for today:

11 AM

I just finished the HTML tutorials. It’s familiar material so I expected it to go pretty quickly. The front-end libraries are not familiar so those are going to be more of a grind.

It may be overambitious but I believe I can finish the responsive web design certification by the end of today if I apply myself.

1 PM

Finished the CSS modules. I was happy to observe that my brain was actually retaining information.

4 PM

Done with the visual design modules. Accessibility next.

This box shadow looks really swanky. I’m saving this for later:
box-shadow: 0 10px 20px rgba(0,0,0,0.19), 0 6px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.23);

The positioning tutorials aren’t very helpful. I’m able to pass the exercises easily enough but I don’t feel I understand normal flow, positioning, and float. Did some reading in here but it’s slow going: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html

Will probably do some YouTube browsing to find a more genpop-focused explanation.

Color theory is cool. Playing with the lightness of different hues is fun. Playing with saturation isn’t much fun, because you’re basically choosing how dreary you want it to be. Lightness though goes from gentle and comforting to serious and subdued.

4 Likes
2

Good luck! How far along are you with the Front-end Certificate?

3

I just finished the HTML tutorials. It’s familiar material so I expected it to go pretty quickly. The front-end libraries are not familiar so those are going to be more of a grind.

It may be overambitious but I believe I can finish the responsive web design certification by the end of today if I apply myself.

4

Hey very good tip
On spotify and I tunes they have a podcast
I really would recomend u to lissen to it they give allot of helpfull tips :slight_smile:

5

I listened to an epsiode the other day and it was very motivating and encouraging :slight_smile:

6

It might be overambitious, who can say! But goals are awesome and I hope it motivates you :slight_smile:
Are you planning on uploading your projects on the forums? I look forward to seeing what you accomplish. Happy Coding!

7

Yeah, anything of interest really.

Finished the CSS modules. I was happy to observe that my brain was actually retaining information.

8

Thanks for the tip Kitty, I listen to a lot of podcasts while working out and going for long walks, so I’ll add them to my queue.

2 Likes
9

Further updates for today will go in the OP to avoid spamming the board.

10

Yesterday was a bust. I ended up spending most of the day working on a spreadsheet someone requested instead of learning.

I’ve finished applied accessibility and responsive web design principles, moving on to CSS Flexbox. Also found my old CodePen login so I can screw around and have some fun in between.

I want to do a tribute page to the old Hot Dog Stand theme for Windows 95. When I was a kid I would always change the family computer’s color scheme to Hot Dog Stand (because I liked hot dogs, obviously) and then wonder why it would always be different when I came back. (Ref. https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-hot-dog-stand-color-scheme/)

12:45 pm

Finished CSS Flexbox. I may have spent a little too much time playing with it in CodePen but I don’t regret it. Going for a run, then CSS Grid.

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11

Hey nph, I think we are on the same journey.
I recently got laid off due to the pandemic and decided to invest my unemployment time to become a web developer. I’m 28 and I’m doing my second career change.
I believe I’ll finish the Responsive Web Design challenges today and then get started on the projects.
My initial goal is to become a front-end developer and then get into full-stack.
I wish you all the best and I’d be happy to help you (if I know enough to help that is lol) anytime.

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12

Likewise, good luck to both of us :-).

FWIW I’d hire you based on your grammar alone.

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13

I started fCC about six weeks ago. I’ve completed Responsive Web Design, and I’m close to done with Basic JavaScript.

Those hot dog stand colors are hideous, lol. Looking forward to seeing your tribute page. Very original idea for a tribute project.

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14

Finished a tribute page so that it passed all the requirements. But I want to clean up the leftover spaghetti code and make it a bit prettier before submitting it.

Note: I still want to do the hot dog stand tribute, but I wanted to check the boxes on a project before having too much fun. Work before play!

2 Likes
15

Whew! Been a little bit since I last updated.

Took the weekend off to go to a friend’s place and set up his bike trainer. Came back with 10 lbs of fresh produce from his garden, including 5 lbs of blueberries I picked at his wife’s friend’s place. Winning.

I skipped ahead to the JavaScript tutorial yesterday and did most of it, but I got stuck on this one: https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-javascript/record-collection. I’m redoing the last few on array and object access notations to get a better grasp of those things.

An ex-coworker and I have been discussing a side project of his he’d like me to work on, which will combine some sales (my previous job), information management on the back end, and building a site. Even if the business doesn’t work out, it’s going to be a great real-world application and I’m excited to start. My brother and I are also talking about automating his trading strategy in the Fidelity API, which sounds pretty easy tbh. Between those and all the crazy ideas I’ve been coming up with, I have no shortage of side projects to work on! The real trouble is going to be disciplining myself to finish things, wrap them up with a nice bow, and then actually stop working on them and move on to the next thing.

No progress on sprucing up the tribute page. The problem is I want it to look nice but I’m not comfortable making conscious design choices, which is a mental block I’ll just have to get over. I think what I’ll do is those swanky box shadows I mentioned above with a silver background, and import a striking Google font that looks vaguely literary without being hard on the eyes. If I can do those things and get it to collapse to a single column with just the text content on my smartphone, then I’ll call it a day.

16

Finished the Goethe tribute page. https://codepen.io/nholtman/pen/MWKxKZR

-Picked a lovely font called Spectral: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral. The design of the page overall looks great (IMHO) and it resizes very nicely.

-Spaghetti code cleaned up.

-Validated HTML and CSS with https://validator.w3.org/ and https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator.

-Made the YouTube embed responsive using https://www.creativebloq.com/netmag/how-add-responsive-video-your-website-51411565. (I’ll admit I just copied the code snippets, I don’t understand the underlying reasons for the choices.)

Submitted for evaluation, wish me luck! On to the next project…

17

I think you might like this video - it might just be review of what you already know. Best of luck :slight_smile:!

18

Okay, another strange week but not a bad one.

An ex-coworker asked me to make this form, which I’m still working on: http://garlic-ravioli.com/hockeydemo/signup.html. Might even get paid later if this little side gig takes off! If not, it’s still great experience working on a real application that’ll go live in the next week or so. Still needs another 20% of work getting the PHP e-mail right and another 20% making everything pretty, and I need to rewrite some of the content. The CSS I mostly stole from my Goethe tribute page, the HTML I wrote from scratch, and the PHP I copied from a tutorial and pared down to the essentials (because I don’t know anything about PHP yet).

This garlic-ravioli site is where I’m keeping my projects now, so I can play around with the hosting admin side and test things like PHP. I can definitely recommend siteground.com so far as a n00b.

The sad thing to report is I haven’t put any work into FCC tutorials at all this week. I need to get the JS one done and start getting my fingers into React by Sunday or my mentor/friend is going to make disappointed faces at me!

19

Do you understand the JS lessons? What I mean is, are you retaining the information? Because I finished that while retaining and understanding nothing.

I started floundering through React and Redux, but I’ve stopped for now to try to straighten out my JS problem.

20

Yes, but I have a lot of VBA programming under my belt so the concepts aren’t new to me. Do you have any other programming in your background? The learning curve for your first real language is fairly difficult, about as much so as learning Calculus if you ask me. But once you get really get the hang of variables and functions the rest is pretty smooth. If you’re into RPGs at all I’d recommend spending a lot of time trying to build a text-based one, that helps me.

As a rule, I think the most overlooked part of coding education these days (kids these days!) is thinking up ways to use whatever you just learned to make something fun or just plain funny. It’s like trying to learn chemistry without trying to make a bomb even once, and like, what’s even the point of that?

You have to play to learn, so learn to play. That’s what I say!

1 Like