My Software Engineering journey has been all over the map. It constantly feels like it’s been stop-and-go for months on in. On the flip side of that, I feel like I’m just trying to find my footing. After all, this is a self-teaching journey. I do have my own curriculum that I’ve been following but most definitely not to a tee, because I tend to deviate from it a little.
I will often get to a certain point, and although I don’t necessarily get stuck, the increase in difficulties keep me from progressing further. I don’t like advancing unless I fully understand a concept, and if I am having a rough go at someone’s teachings, I’ll find another platform that may explain things differently…Maybe in a way that I can understand a bit more.
I have been in the Reddit forums because I figure there are a lot of experienced developers who frequent them. I find a lot of good advice and others that aren’t very helpful for beginners such as myself…Like telling a novice programmer to open up the developer tools, analyze every bit of visible JavaScript code, and start creating. I say to myself, “what in the world are you talking about!?” I guess they MEAN well, but this is all advice that is not meant for the complete “noob.”
I did find something useful in those forums which lead to a few resources I am presently using. I really like how it’s going so far. I’m reading “A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript” by Mark Myers which coincides with another website he’s developed to practice his teachings; in the form of ten interactive exercises per chapter. The website is JavaScript Simplified which is supposed to be used with his book of the same title, but its out of publication.
The issue with his “A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript” book is it was published in 2013 and ES6 came on the scene in 2015; thus their are a lot of key updates that are missing. Luckily I have ChatGPT to send screenshots from each chapter, with a prompt I created to revise its text to the most up-to-date revision. Thus far my system has been working pretty well for me.
Until now, I have been able to power though (and understand) the concepts behind alerts, printing to the console, declaring variables, math expressions and operators, ++ and –, logical operators, concatenating strings, template literals, user prompts, if…else and else…if statements, and comparison operators. Tomorrow I’m getting into arrays such as pop(), push(), shift(), and unshift(), for loops, and much more.
It has been quite the journey so far and I’ve only just begun. It’s only been a month or so. I have imposter syndrome like everyone else, but especially being that I left my previous job in Desktop Support to pursue learning SWE on a full-time basis. Luckily it’s not an “ish hits the fan” situation for me, but I have to do this…Otherwise it will have all been for nothing.
I passed a series of assessments which qualify me for a program called “Apprenti,” which is like a full-stack Software Development boot camp that guarantees job placement as an Apprentice for a period of one-year. They typically don’t come calling for several months, so in the meantime, I figured I’d get a leg up via self-study. No matter what, I am doubly serious about my intentions of becoming a programmer and will keep going until I feel that I am job-ready.
