First, I’m not a native English speaker but I hope my English is good enough nonetheless. I’m 23 and my life has been kind of a mess for the last 5 years. So now is the time for me to start getting things together and get a web developer job.
Here’s how I plan to do it:
Complete CS50: Introduction to Computer Science
Complete CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript
Read Eloquent JavaScript
Earn the Full Stack Certificate on freeCodeCamp by completing the 5 remaining certifications: JS Algorithms & Data Structures, Front End Libraries, Data Visualization, APIs and Microservices, and Quality Assurance.
There’ll probably be much more to it, but I think it’s fair to say that doing all this would be a good start. As of now, I’ve completed the Responsive Web Design certification on FCC so I already have some familiarity with HTML & CSS, as well as Python and JavaScript (haven’t built anything in these languages yet, but I have a grasp of the syntax of both).
As far as languages go, even if I’ll get a grasp of languages like C & Python (through CS50) along the way, my main focus will be on JavaScript because I want to get into web development.
For now, I’m setting the goal of just 1 hour of code a day. Within the next few weeks I plan to gradually increase it to 4 hours. In the last few days I’ve been starting CS50 and am now going through week 0, which introduces some basic concepts of computer science as well as the language Scratch. I’ve spent maybe 4-5 hours in Problem Set 0, which is about building a Scratch project, and I’d say it’s now 90% done and honestly I’m pretty happy with with the result. It’s really fun and (as basic as it is) it’s really satisfying to finally build something more complex than a static webpage.
Weeks 1 to 5 will be on the language C, which I’m not at all familiar with and I’ve heard it’s a pretty difficult language, so I’m prepared for it to be significantly harder than the Scratch project but I’ll get through it one way or the other.
This thread will be updated from time to time as I progress.
Hi @Rodrigo_97! I think that’s great you are setting aside at least 1 hour to code in a day. I also think you are learning too many languages. 3 languages as a beginner seems like a lot and might be confusing. (C, Python and JS).
My suggestion is to start with the language you want to learn the most, get a good foundation on it and build projects with it before moving on to another. Otherwise, keep it up!!!
I agree, with the above statement. 3 languages will eventually get very hard. I’m not saying it’s not possible but save yourself the headache. I understand where you are coming from. I was the same way, I wanted to learn hard, would go up to 5hrs per day. Stress myself out getting on to code to learn python and js/html/css.
A year later, I’m just down to javascript. Been working with react, while still doing a little bit of css along the way. An 1hr a day is not bad at all. It will help ton, you can do more, just don’t stress yourself or over do it. I’m telling you because I did the same thing. Take it with a ton of patience, if you cant code for an hour that day. Don’t worry about it, life happens. Look at twitter when you poop. lol. Read what ther people are working on, read dev articles. You can always be doing something that helps.
Sorry for the novel, just trying to pass a little of what I did wrong. So hopefully it helps you. I’m a year in, and I do a 1hr a day. When I can I do more. Patience is key.
English is my second language as well, so if you are spanish speaker hit me up haha. We can help eachother learn. I’m not too good yet though.
I tried something similar, I took a few python courses at university and I know JS from online. They really don’t go well together as python has django I think for front end whereas JS has JQuery and React, it also integrates well with AWS later on if you get into Node. AWS is very expensive though to set up. I think Python is still very capable in other ways I just haven’t used it much myself, I would focus on one, either Python all the way or JS. With C I guess you could code something up in C but it’s not used extensively, once again if you spend lots of time on it, then you don’t use it for a while, you’ll need to spend time refreshing again. All the best either way.
As for the languages, my intention isn’t really to learn 3 languages at once (at least not in the same depth). What I intend to do is to first learn the fundamentals through CS50, which happens to have various languages (like C & Python), and then, once I’m reasonably strong on the fundamentals, focus exclusively on JavaScript. If that makes sense.
But, noted, if it gets too confusing then I’ll just focus on JavaScript right away and come to CS50 later.
Completed week 1 of CS50! It was somewhat challenging, but it didn’t take me an insane amount of time. Probably because, despite it being in C, I was already familiar with the basic concepts from Python and JavaScript. In fact, I even found the C syntax surprisingly similar to JS. So it wasn’t off-putting like I expected it to be, at least for now.
I did both Mario problems and the Cash one, which introduced me to greedy algorithms. I’ll probably also do the Credit one before moving on to week 2.
Anyway, I loved the challenge and it was so thrilling to finally pass all the tests and do everything correctly! One of the cool things about programming seems to be that you can feel like a monkey and a Nobel Prize winner in the same day xD
Why wouldn’t you learn multiple languages at once? For one, any developer job is going to require familiarity with like 10 different languages. Second, how would learning html, css, and js together be counterproductive? Third, let’s be real, if you’re only spending an hour a day to get through these cert courses, you will not be qualified to change jobs to something in development for about 8 years. Not everyone wants to wait that long to make a move.
It’s been a little while since the last time I posted here. I’m still doing CS50 and up until week 3 it was definitely challenging but I never got stuck for too long. Week 4, however, has been a whole different beast. I spent several days to even just properly understand what was being asked in this problem and, although I never thought about giving up, I was definitely discouraged by what seemed to be an impossible and completely overwhelming task. I then started getting a few things right but then got stuck in the last part of the problem (the blur function) for more than a week. It was frustrating to not understand but today I finally completed it, after more than 2 weeks of getting stuck and countless headaches! Feels really awesome!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned with this it’s that when the code doesn’t work it’s generally more helpful to think of the problem at a higher level (and write some pseudocode) instead of getting bogged down on the syntax.
Now there’s still the second problem of week 4, and then week 5 before I move on to week 6 which will be about Python and which I expect to be much easier since I already have some familiarity with the language (unlike with C, which has been totally new for me and covers concepts that don’t exist in other languages). Then at the end of the course I’ll get to build a web app using Python and JavaScript. There’s still a way to go before that, but I’ll get to it within the next few weeks.
Hey there! So the past month I’ve been stuck in the Recover problem from CS50 and today is a great day because I FINALLY did it!
What was happening for about a month is that I read it, didn’t understand anything, so I was completely unmotivated and stopped coding for several days. Then when I came back I would only stay on it for 20-30 min where I would read the problem, watch the walkthrough and give up again because I still didn’t understand anything. And that’s basically what kept repeating itself for several weeks where I would go on and off.
But, finally, in the last few days I’ve been going harder on it and started coding every day again (although, I must say, coding is the easy part, the essential part is properly understanding the problem) and now I once again solved something that I initially felt too dumb to do. Maybe there’s a lesson there, to stick with it even when you don’t understand anything, eventually it will start making sense.
It’s been a WHILE since the last time I posted here. As I said above, I was always already struggling with week 4 of CS50, and although I ended up completing it I wasn’t understanding a lot of the code I was writing. It worked, but I often didn’t understand why. So when I arrived at week 5’s problem set it was yet another beast that seemed insurmountable. I again got into the same pattern: read the instructions for 20-30 min, not understand what’s going on, give up for the day, spend a few days without even looking at it, and repeat the same process a few days later.
So in early november I basically ended up quitting for a few weeks. I was considering other options, maybe I should do an easier course and come back to CS50 later? But then, on november 22 (I wrote the day, to see how much time it will take me to complete the course) I basically thought f*ck it, if I give up when things get tough I won’t get anywhere. So I decided to restart CS50 all over again, from week 1. This time, I started spending 3 hours per day on it. And I bursted through the first few weeks! The fact that I was already familiar with the problems obviously helped, but I still got through it a lot quicker and when I compared the code in my solutions now to a few months ago in my first attempt there’s a huge difference. My code is a lot cleaner and more understandable. There’s only one change I made to my approach in this attempt (other than increasing the time spent on it to 3 hours/day): instead of just passively watching the lecture, I would always spend the first day of the week just playing around with the code presented on the lectures, expanding on it and seeing what works and what doesn’t. It was fun and I ended up learning a lot of things that didn’t stick the first time. I still got stuck a few times in the problem sets, but it was never for more than 1 or 2 hours and it was usually on pretty elementary stuff (like a variable that should be 2 or 3 lines higher or lower).
And today is a great day because I finally got through week 5’s problem set! What seemed like a behemoth the first time was just a challenging problem this time. In the first attempt I spent months to reach week 5. But this time, I got through the first 5 weeks of CS50 in a little more than 2 weeks. Week 6 will be about Python, week 7 about SQL, and then week 8 will be about building web pages with Python, Flask, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. All stuff I’m already familiar with on a basic level (except for SQL). So I think I’ve now completed the hardest part of CS50 (weeks 1 to 5, using C), which definitely increased my confidence in my capacity to learn.
