I'm starting my coding journey, planning to shift to software development, from being a military officer.
Yes, I'm doing the FCC curriculum, currently at Responsive Web Design course and have already completed the 4th out of the 5 projects needed for the certification.
However, my problem is that... I feel like I'm just breezing through the curriculum. Throughout the lesson challenges, I feel like it's just instruction-following. Yes, I do research oftentimes about the selectors, elements, properties, values, etc. But, during the projects, I'm just using inspect element/view page source to properly "create" my project, and I feel like I'm just cheating at this point, and I'm just reverse-engineering the sample template of the project I'm supposed to build, then I'd just review the code to see how everything works like that.
Did you also start like this? Is this the natural flow of learning how to code? Do I just need more exposure/experience so that time will come when I can properly build my own code without looking?
Currently feel the same way, have some knowledge of HTML CSS, and Javascript, and I started from the beginning of the FCC. Feeling as if I’m just being told what to do and just following along. But I find real experience in just building my own projects. Started typing in Google search javascript or css projects and trying to do them or follow along tutorials that actually finish multiple small projects.
Recently just started looking into networking hence I’m here on the forum giving my input where I think it’s needed in the hopes of meeting some people on the game journey like me who would like to work together and start a little group helping one another on this journey.
FCC is definitely best way to start learning to code and prepare yourself slowly but steadily for the real world IT job.
But from my own experiences, the real learning only comes when you start building projects on your own ( with the help of Google, Stackoverflow etc but never ever look at existing solutions ) .
I highly recommend to build projects from frontendmentor, they have a strong and supportive community as well.
Once you conquer FM projects, then pick up few medium / big porfolio projects to build; before you start applying for internship / job.
Make sure you keep all your work from day 1 in GitHub only, it shows your commitment and consistency.
A lot of people have experienced this.
I would suggest at this early stage to just focus on building a lot of projects.
Most of the projects you build will be just for learning.
The more skills you have under your belt and the more experience you have then you will start to build more projects with some complexity. Those complex projects can be the ones you show on your portfolio for jobs.
But for now just focus on building and continuing to grow your skillset.
Frontend mentor is a popular choice for building projects.
Then you can start to build other project on your own from your own ideas.
I would suggest reframing from using the inspect tool to much and reading through documentation more.
Also, learning how to ask more questions on the forum when you get stuck is important too.
Learning how to debug your code, research through documentation and asking for help are vital skills needed for a job. So it is important that you start practicing that now.
I see nothing wrong with placing all of your projects on Github.
When it comes to getting a job, you can always place your strongest projects on your main profile.
Hiring managers and recruiters are not going to dig through all of your repositories because they simply don’t have time.
They will only look at the top projects you choose to show them.
Don’t feel like you have to limit how many projects you put on there.
You can always archive your more beginner projects later if you really want to.
start adding FCC projects to GH as well, as knowing Git and Github is very critical in getting job and collaboration with others during real world project building.
thanks for your topic as I am in the same situation currently passing through JavaScript. I think it is not really nessasarry to go through all the challanges before you can start own projects. I mean I passed HTML & CSS and now I am doing JavaScript and thanks god I see this topic right now in my timeline. I will smaller my amount of time going through the curriculum and increase the time building projects to become more used to my current knowledge. As everyone would say, the basics are the fundamentals to be a good programmer.
