I really want to give up!

You Can Do This!
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I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard mentally in my life.

Maybe I’m just getting old but damn, the amount of information intake for me is absurd. (Especially when on a personal time crunch…)

I don’t know what’s going on with the “Learn Accessibility by Building a Quiz” module. It’s seriously thrown me for a loop and making me feel like an idiot.

Currently on step 48 and it’s asking:

"Tidy up the header, by using Flexbox to put space between the children, and vertically center them.

Then, fix the header to the top of the viewport"

Um, ok, yea I can’t remember how to do most of that?

This is the outcome of it’s request:

display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: space-between;
position: fixed;
top: 0;

How is this normal for someone to remember so many things, especially such specific, unique code/commands??

I feel like a good majority of the exercises in this section have asked some very obscure things that I seriously don’t remember, some examples include;

  • remove underline from anchor tags (i don’t remember learning this)
  • nav > ul > li (THIS )
  • turn the cursor into a pointer (pretty sure i didnt learn this)
  • change color of elements to something with a contrast ratio of at least 7:1. (which was white i think according to the hints (how was I supposed to figure that out?))

Is it just me or is the difficulty level increasing as I progress ?

I just seriously don’t understand how one is expected to recall such huge amount of specific info.

Maybe I’m letting too much time pass in-between exercises (It’s been 4 days…)

Sorry I’m just kind of annoyed to be honest and just wanted to vent.

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We don’t memorize syntax. We look up stuff all the time.

Yes, you are given less stuff to just copy and need to start combining information from previous steps.

You really, really aren’t. Searching reference material is expected.

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For this I suggest below techniques which are working for me very well

  1. Create weekly agile list ( personal + professional tasks to be taken care next week ). Don’t work on any other tasks

  2. Break down 1 day into 4 sub-days of 6 hours each and work upon agile tasks to be taken care for the week. This way you will find out time killers / wasters.

  3. Have big quarterly goals, don’t bother to think yearly or after X years etc

  4. Every weekend do “agile retrospective” and adjust / plan accordingly for next week.

Programming is marathon of 6 - 12 months atleast for average joe; so don’t give up.

Do read below books

  1. https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299

  2. https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Equals-Freedom-Manual-Mk1-MOD1/dp/1250274435

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You don’t really. Like the exercises (on fCC) do breeze through some concepts quickly, and you may forget them in time. There are also hints, which if used too much may hinder your ability to code things on your own.

For you to actually remember things consistently (on my own experience) is if you put the time to build projects (websites or web apps) from the ground up.

fCC provides you with starters (like the Survey Form and Portfolio) to get that HTML and CSS skills of yours leveled up (see mine built here).

For every project you built, you learn by applying what you’ve been through up to that point (concepts and exercises). Keep it up and it will stick with your mind, forgetting things is normal. You can always look it up with the Internet, or take notes like me if you can.

P.S. Take a break if you can from learning. Let what you learned sink in your mind (maybe think about it?). Once ready, you can go back and continue your journey.

5

The difficulty does increase as you progress. That’s how the curriculum is structured.

Learning to code takes hundreds of hours of practice. You learn by building things, and you have to keep it up as a habit in order to learn. And you have to keep learning at all stages of your career, not just the beginning.

You’re not meant to memorise lines of code. You have google available. You’re meant to understand the concepts, so that when you need to do a specific thing, such as centering a div, you can google the syntax/specific code you need.

Over time you will naturally remember lines of code you use all the time, but you will also be googling other lines of code you use less often. You’re not meant to have everything memorised and it doesn’t matter what you memorise and what you don’t (because you can use google). Understanding the concepts is most important, as well as applying them on a regular and consistent basis.

Each certificate in freeCodeCamp takes in theory 300 hours. The certificates might not literally take 300 hours, but the number is there as an indication of how much time you need to dedicate to learning and building.

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If I speak honestly, most of the things you’re instructed to do to complete the challenge; I learned them and their significance when I started building simple projects(most of them were from FCC). And the only responsive design section was available during that time was the legacy one.
And some of the things that you’re told to do in the mentioned challenge(from the new RWD section), I didn’t even know existed cause I never came across them in FCC back then.
And I always thought FCC taught everything you needed to know to become a developer and would never need to go anywhere else to learn development because of the amount of information I was consuming, which felt infomation overload (which is common to everyone starting out). But when I started building things; I realized that I was very far from the truth and that FCC only taught you the basic things - things that help you to become aware of what can be done with the language you’re learning; at the same time, builds the confidence that: “You too can become a developer and develop apps just like everyone else if you put in some efforts and practice”.
So once you build that confidence and start getting creative with your project(s), you’re forced to google the things that you want to add to your project(s), which brings into realization that FCC is just the first few steps of the ladder that leads you to the development world.

Conclusion:
What you’re feeling is normal, and every single one of us felt that way at the beginning, and the only way to overcome this is by being consistent in your journey and realising that there will always be something that don’t know about doesn’t matter how good/experienced you’re. Cause one of the skills that you pick up during your journey is: How to google stuff and make things work.

So, yeah, don’t stress out too much, it’s okay to forget stuff and we all do. No one remembers everything they’ve learned and you won’t as well, even after you’ve become a professional dev. Just pay attention to what you’re able to do with what you’ve learned and put it in practice by creating small code snippets and that’s how it will stick to you memory.

Afterall, the only way to remember/understand something is when you know why it exists.

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