I am doing the Picasso Painting Project in the responsive design course. I am just writing the codes according to the instructions. I don’t understand how to think like that, why I am doing it, how to do it in some other way. The earlier projects were easy and intuitive, and I learned lots of new things. I completed the first two certification projects easily. But now that I am progressing, it feels like I am just following the instructions. I googled the things I didn’t understand, but many things are still unclear to me. I need your advice on this.
One more thing. Actually, I have to learn HTML, CSS, and Javascript before April 1st. So, any advice for that?
If you don’t mind me asking, why you must learn it within now and two weeks? Is this a goal that your place of work has set for you? Or is this a goal you have set yourself? - Don’t get me wrong. It can be done in two weeks. Question is: do you want to? You will most likely not know everything well enough if you rush throughout the entire curriculum and you will come across things like you are experiencing now.
In comparison to myself, I took between a month and a half to two months to finish this curriculum and I spent a lot of time re-reading every single explanation, fiddling around with the code to see how it would affect the page if I were to change it, looking up additional information on MDN/W3, etcetera.
The Picasso painting teaches you important intermediate/advanced CSS elements such as the z-index, the different types of measuring units (percentage, pixel-based etc) and most importantly: the different position parameters. The penny did not drop for me right away when I did this, but try to look up information on external sources as you go. Especially when you go further in the FCC curriculum, such as in Front End Development, this stuff is a must-know. The course expects you to go out of your way, beyond the course, to find additional information and keep practicing what you’ve just learnt. Getting stuck is part of your learning journey.
My advice: if you’re stuck, take a break (very important - it’s very easy to stress yourself out). Try to comprehend and fully understand what you are doing. If you don’t, go to MDN/W3 and look up some more information. Open VS Code, fiddle around by making a couple of divs, adding various positioning elements to them, experiment and see for yourself what it does. And, give yourself more than two weeks. Getting stuck is completely fine and normal. Like, for example: yesterday I couldn’t wrap my head around a challenge inside of the D3 - Data Visualisation course. I decided to call it a day. And today I read it once and fully understood what was going on. Solved it in 2 minutes.
I really appreciate your thorough response. Thanks a lot for this.
This target is set by my place of work. I have no choice. I don’t know how to do this. I am too stressed because of this. This task is incredibly challenging and difficult. Anyway, thanks for the response.
First of all, I would advice you to have a talk with your place of work. Considering you are on and about the halfway mark on the Responsive Web Design Course and still have to do JavaScript, they must understand that a deadline this short is simply not feasible in a normal, healthy way unless you study, let’s say 12 to 18 hours a day. Ask them for more time if possible. How much time have they initially given you? Why the short notice from their side? If the time given is simply unreasonable and their demands too high, then you should perhaps look into your local labor laws since this doesn’t sound quite right.
If you must, really really must do this in that short timeframe. Well. Like I said, it can be done. But the effectiveness of your endeavors and as to how much the knowledge will actually stick after the course varies on a case-to-case basis considering you are practically overloading your brain with knowledge. I don’t think this approach will make both you, nor your employer happy if they simply hold on to this approach. Go talk to them first and discuss your feelings.
As you’re totally new to coding, I don’t think your work is giving you a reasonable expectation here. Especially as the Javascript course will level up the difficulty if you’ve never done programming before.
It also sounds like your work aren’t offering you any support/mentoring related to coding. Which if you’re a total beginner and they’re expecting you to complete the course in a short timeframe is something they should offer.
I’d advise talking to your work, explaining that you need more support and a longer timeframe to complete the course. Also consider as the other commenter said looking into local labor laws/worker rights as this sounds a bit fishy to me too.
Actually, it’s a startup, and they have very tight deadlines. They gave me approximately 1 month to learn this, along with git and bitbucket. It took me 4-5 days to understand the basics of git well, and then I tried different resources for HTML and CSS. I then came across the FCC and really learned a lot here. But I am not able to grasp the later parts of this course completely.
Not that my input necessarily adds much, but the FCC Certifications are generally considered to take about 300 hours each.
On that basis, even just the Responsive Web Design and first Javascript courses would take over a month, even studying 18 hrs every single day.
Those courses only give you a foundation in HTML, CSS and Javascript. You’d need to complete several other certifications to become properly conversant.
May be because I am good in data structures and algorithms. I have done over 400 problems on leetcode, and earned 5 star rating on hackerrank. I made few very basic projects in flutter using YouTube tutorials. But didn’t do anything in web development.
This is just my opinion but I’d consider if this job is worth it. I do not get good vibes from a start up that is setting what seem to me unrealistic expectations at the get go without giving you any support.
How much are they paying you to do this, and how many hours do they expect you to work?
My journey ended with me going into public relations and doing coding as mostly a hobby with occasional front end design/wordpress admin freelancing. So others may be better to answer this.
Don’t learn it in parallel. While you can use JavaScript as a third pillar to add interactivity to your webpage, site or app, it is not the main purpose of the JavaScript course on FCC. That course will teach you the basics-intermediate knowledge of the language, its logic and the ability to solve problems. DOM-manipulation, as in using JavaScript to update/adjust parts of your HTML/CSS code based on events and/or inputs, not so much. First get Responsive down before you even move on to JavaScript and stuff like that.
Actually I can’t leave this opportunity because of the recession. According to news sources, hiring will get back to normal till mid 2024. So, I will have to stay here somehow. Things are quite hard now.
The fact that hiring in tech is slower right now means its harder to find a different job but not impossible. You can certainly still continue searching for other opportunities.
I agree with Jeremy. I do feel this is an abusive workplace and to keep looking for other options. I’d even go as far to say as to seek non coding options if they present themselves.
Being in a toxic workplace can really mess with your confidence, so please keep in mind that their expectations are not reasonable and if you’re struggling it isn’t your fault.
I think bro you have to work hard, you know if you are a beginner then it sometimes makes you a little bit confused about what is going on in your course. You will feel so confused, but hey! if you are not able to understand anything then just google it otherwise the best option is to search for it on youtube this will work I am 101% sure.
