Since I was a little kid I wanted to work with computers. And at the age of 11 I made a website in HTML for my class. It was 1999 and we did not have FaceBook, MySpace or anything like that. But I made something for my classroom so we could stay in touch when the school ended.
Ever since I alway’s liked the internet, websites and the evolution of the internet. But I never made work of it to start a career in web Development or anything like that. But since a year, maybe more I wanted to change that. So I started here on FreeCodeCamp with HTML and CSS… I made my tribute website and a month later I became a dad for the first time.
Now a year later I’m still wanting to achieve the succes of finding a new job in web development. So I came back to this place. Only to learn, at this moment, that I still do not understand how to grid a css file… And I started to forget the things I learned.
So here I am again… Wanting to learn the craft but afraid to fail.
How do you guy’s and girls do this? I don’t even know a lot of people that I can ask for help…
Don’t feel alone and disheartened, I have been rocking the same boat since 2016, everytime I got stuck on some exercise or tutorial I simply gave up, not realizing that most people who succeed have done so because of persistence. Last year I made a commitment to become a developer, only realizing that I had still not overcome my fear of failure, maybe I still haven’t and never will, but now I know that you need to practice the craft and keep at it, no matter what because the more we exercise the more our brains adapt to the learning and gain knowledge. Keep at it!
First of all, if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask here - it’s why the forum was invented and it is a friendly group of people.
Yeah, getting a job is very tough. At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I once wrote a doc summarizing my thoughts on getting the first job.
Yeah, forgetting stuff is normal. There is too much to memorize. It’s more important to know what is available and be able to look up the details. To be honest, I couldn’t do CSS grid from memory - I just don’t use it much. The things that I use a lot stick in the memory, but I know I can look up what I can’t remember.
Just keep learning and building things. And when you get tired of that, mix it up and for a while build and learn things.
So here I am again… Wanting to learn the craft but afraid to fail.
I used to teach chess. I used to tell my young students, “Don’t be afraid to lose. The main people that rarely loose are people that are afraid and only play easy games. Good chess players lose lots of games because they challenge themselves. That’s how they get good.”
Soooo… you made one website with basic html and CSS and a year later you can’t remember everything?
That’s not really a reason to be discouraged - it’s totally normal to forget things. Especially if you hadn’t acquired a deep understanding yet AND had a break of almost a year.
So here is the truth: Nowadays we not only have Facebook, but also Google and other websites, meaning “knowing” has become a lot less vital, compared to “knowing where to look” and “knowing what to look for”.
You save a bookmark like w3school.com and got what you need to know for html and CSS.
You save a bookmark for getbootstrap.com and never bother with making a CSS-grid yourself.
Ofcourse you also go through the courses to get to know how things work (again).
At the end of the day, it’s not about remembering all syntax and keywords and whatnot, but about understanding how they work and knowing where to look if you forgot something. Because you will forget something. Everyone will.
Especially if you hadn’t had a lot of practice, forgetting things is normal. So don’t sweat it and instead prepare for it - by keeping resources at hand that can help you
Plus: if you go for WebDev, you most likely will use some advanced programs for making websites and there are a ton of options and those constantly change. So you will end up having to learn a lot of new things all the time. Meaning it’s even less important to memorize everything because you might end up working with a new program where major aspects are different.
These are such a bunch of supportive answers!
There is some great feedback over here! So this really can help to prove me wrong and to continu in this hunt for succes.
