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Diego Moura
Diego Moura

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One year as a self-taught dev and employed!📚

This post, in any way, attempts to be a road map for becoming anything. So don't try and make sense of any particular order I present some of the things I learned. First, because this post would be rather long if I were to enumerate all the fantastic things I came across, and second because they may not follow any particular order, other than how it will come to me while I try to piece this together.

Soon it will be one year of my journey into teaching myself a new career, and it's funny how it came full-circle. I started to code with HTML and CSS, static websites and not a lot of fuzz. Now, on my 9-5, I do pretty much the same thing, plus a little programming here and there.

It was crucial to me to get as much of each language's fundamentals as I could think of when I started with them. I put it in such a worldly manner because now I realize that what I thought were fundamental, more often than not, were just the very basics. I just started to brush the surface of the fundamentals. Lol!

Let's take HTML, for example. I realize I know very little about meta tags, ARIA code, or the canvas element and its API. On the other hand, I strive to write semantic HTML considering the content-management side of things and the assistive technology side of things. I can use the srcset property to load images based on the user's device resolution or bandwidth limitation, saving them time with faster loads and money with extra unused downloaded content.

I even had professional experience in the ancient art of HTML tables for newsletter templating. Which in and out itself was a patience exercise, but also a great lesson in building deeply nested structures (and why we should avoid that!)

Between the things, I have professional experience or a solid, researched and tested knowledge on the topic, and things I know very little, are the things I'm acquaintance. Like forms and their input fields! They both are ubiquitous elements of the web. They are also sort of dynamic when passed in attributes, in the way those attributes can trigger a response from the DOM based on conditions. Take in the case of a validation error on a password field, for example. I would say forms and input fields are my topic of choice for studying HTML at the moment.

In particular, because forms are the pillar of the front-end I'm building for my NodeJS back-end project. But that's a topic for the next time I try to write something.

Until next time! Bye!

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