I initially got into programming from youtube videos on visual basic when I was 11 or so. I am 16 now, and within those years I am fairly proud of what I learned. I learned PHP from the PHP manual, HTML by looking at sites’ source, CSS but browser stackoverflow and just explorer the quirks that way and Javascript but messing around with it for weeks.
During this, I was constantly tempted to take shortcuts but following some program such as Codecadamy. I don’t want to say they were terrible but… they were. I don’t understand how a single person could learn anything except from “monkey see, monkey do” from those sites. They tell you exactly what to do, no thinking involved.
I started here with what I thought was a very decent understanding of JS… oh boy was I wrong. I learned so much here that now that I look back at what I knew and realize that I knew next to nothing back then (Now I know only some things, still a very long way to go).
Doing the challenges here is actually challenging, it required me to think in ways I didn’t before and best of all, this is actually fun to do (I ended up doing a couple 48-hour coding marathons) and got my front-end certification. Now I am half-way to the back-end certification.
A deep thank you to everybody who made this course possible.