Where were you at, in terms of progress, after learning web dev for 2 years?

I have been learning web development for 2 years now, and I feel like I have hit a plateau. I am attempting to become a skilled full-stack developer. Although, I still feel at this point that I cannot apply my skills professionally just yet. Maybe in time.

I would say that I am skilled in HTML, CSS, JS (front-end), SCSS, PHP, and SQL. I, however, wouldn’t say I am professional level at all of these yet. I can use the Linux command line too. I am just a VERY slow learner, despite me being unemployed for 1.5 years and dedicating a large chunk of my day learning, sometimes, all day long.

After a while, however, my attention span begins to decrease to where I am not as productive.

I am a humble programmer. I don’t brag or show off my skills with pride, because I know there are many others who are better and more talented than me, and I don’t want to embarrass myself.

Although I would say that I am not satisfied with the progress I made. I can at least say I have not yet given up and I continue to strive.

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I’m right there with you. After 2 years I didn’t have anything to show for it other than some code snippets on github. It’s only when I got a burst of confidence to try building something small is when I finally started feeling like I wasn’t intimidated coding anymore. This whole thing has taken a huge tole on me mentally and physically.

As for the attention span thing, I definitely have issues with that and I have to just promise myself to focus on this one thing for the next 30 mins and so on then I might end up getting really into what I’m doing for hours. It feels very overwhelming. i like to do things slowly and methodically but also my attention span can be short sometimes especially when i feel overwhelmed.

I mean I’m unemployed and I’m trying to learn this thing on my own, trying to make my life better and few people understand what kind of effort mentally and physically that takes. All I do is eat, sleep, code and watch youtube (half of what I watch is code related)

At the moment I’m trying to work up to making a blogging site so im tinkering with api endpoints and then with authentication so that I feel like i can actually make that blog and have it not be a masterpiece of jank

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At least I am not alone.

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yeh thats one of the hardest things more me right now. the feeling of being alone. people are supportive of the goal but it just always feels like its just me to solve all my own problems. cant wait to get hired and be past this crappy phase

All I can say is just keep going. I got a front end job after a couple years of self-learning and going to a bootcamp, but in all honesty I just got really, really lucky. But as my brother-in-law told me, you make your own luck. I’ve learned a lot since, but I am still an amateur. I don’t think that feeling will ever really go away. Keep your chin up and stay humble.

It’s ok to be humble, but I think you might be suffering of what’s commonly known as imposter syndrome, we all go through that. It’s a feeling that is always waiting for you to let your guard down to kick in, I don’t think you never really get rid of it, instead you just learn how to deal with it, at least that’s what I think based on my limited experience.

You may be a better programmer than what you actually think you are, and you are without a doubt a better programmer than you were a year ago or even yesterday, whenever your learn something new you already improve as a programmer.

Whether you can apply your skills professionally or not it’s not something that it’s up to you to decide, clients and/or employers are the ones who are going to let you know that. Your focus right now should be in building a portfolio, this is how you gain experience and show off your skills as a developer. Besides, it’s a very rewarding feeling when you build an app that you thought was out of your skill level and somehow you pulled it off after a lot of struggles, this really helps you to build up your confidence.

Hey guys, you can’t compare yourself to others. You’ll go crazy, get dejected, depressed, sad and give up… you’ll think I’ll be never good enough, or can never catch up. — so just STOP comparing yourself to others.

Instead, compare yourself to yourself from yesterday, or from a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. Did you improved? Do you know more? have more experience? Yeah? Good… be proud of that and keep on moving.

I’d also suggest joining a community like Instagram. There are lots of new/learning programmers/web devs on instagram and it’s a pretty supportive community for devs and designers. Just post your stuff, what you’re currently learning on, a neat trick you discovered, a new design you’ve made, etc… you’ll get support and feedback and build up your confidence to post more and more about what you’re learning , doing, or struggling with. It’s basically a show-and-tell platform and that can build up your confidence as you can see what other people are doing, get inspired, and maybe even realize you know more than what you think!

Forgot to mention that progress in programming is not a linear graph. It’s more like a hockey-stick curve… a very long, slow moving progress for who-knows-how-long… and then towards the end, just an A-HA moment and suddenly your learning increases in an exponential rate.

But each person’s progress and struggle (i.e. your learning graph) will be different from the next person. There may be long periods of plateau and quick bursts upwards, then flatline again… each person’s journey is different.