I have been fascinated by programming for many years because I have always been interested in workings of various technologies. As I was unable to find any courses offline, I went onto the internet to find courses. I was overwhelmed to see the high level of saturation of web development courses, so it was very difficult to find the most suitable for myself as a novice beginner.
After a lot of digging, I stumbled across Udemy, which offered many quality web development courses. I finally settled on a course by Colt Steele, which promised to walk me through the very basics of HTML and CSS to the advanced backend, node js, and mongodb.
LO 2: A problem I always face is that whenever I start a new activity, my interest is at its peak, so I dedicate the maximum time I can to it. However, this makes my interest decline quickly and eventually I drop that activity. To overcome this problem, I used to always keep my family members in the loop, so they would often remind me to work on the course whenever I forgot about it. Such reminders helped me to have a proper schedule, otherwise, I would take very long breaks and then I would forget what I had learned previously before the break
LO 4: While completing the course, I would first understand the concept in the video and then try to implement it side by side on my editor. As the course was published a few years ago, some parts of the syntax had changed, so I had to always use websites like stack overflow or other websites to help me solve my problems. A lot of times, I committed very silly errors that took hours or even days to solve. This tested my perseverance and determination throughout my learning process. I often got very frustrated during periods, where I wasn’t able to rectify errors in my code. So I always ensured that I took a short 10-15 break to get my mind somewhere else. Surprisingly, this more often than not helped me to find solutions to the problems.
LO 1: As I progressed through the course, I found the difficulty of the concepts to drastically increase. To keep up with this, I had to slow down my pace and re-watch many videos to fully absorb the content. Additionally, I also referred to other sources to understand more difficult concepts. The course was divided into many units, and there were many exercises along the way. After every unit, there was a mini project I had to make by myself. At first, it always seemed very intimidating to start from scratch, but the sense of accomplishment after completing it was also immense. Whenever I encountered obstacles I used previously mentioned websites like stack overflow to get help. This exposed me to realistic setups and made me independent.
LO 3: I decided I had to be consistent and schedule a suitable time every day, that would ensure my interest is retained. Instead of making a goal to complete the whole course in 5 months, I instead set up a much more effective system of learning from the course for at least 15 minutes every day. At first, these 15 minutes might seem less, but once I started and got into the zone, I was often able to have much longer 30-45 minute sessions.
LPs-
thinker- when I encountered problems, I first tried to solve the problem by myself by looking at the problem from various angles.
knowledgeable- I always tried to implement concepts I learned in projects
inquirer- I always referred to online sources to solve conceptual queries I encountered during the course
After 6 weeks, I was able to successfully complete the nearly 50 hours long course. I felt a very strong sense of accomplishment because I always thought I would have dropped the course midway, as I have often done in the past. If I were to redo the course, I would watch the course videos more carefully so I can save time, because I had developed a habit of always skimming through the videos, so I had to rewatch the videos many times. Instead, I would save much more time with this method. Overall, I really enjoyed learning so much at my own pace and will. In the end, I was able to learn about many web technologies that are commonly used on the internet today by professionals.
