How is it to become a self taught developer

Introduction

Hey there guys I am Meet and I am from India.

Here in Dev Community, technically it will be my first post.
Following is the table of content:

1. Experiences of being a self-taught developer.
2. Its benefits.
3. Its drawbacks.
4. At last I will share some valuable resources to get started with the journey.

So let's begin.

Inspiration

I responded to and analyzed the annual survey by Stack Overflow. According to the stack overflow survey 2022 results Learning to code online increased from 60% to 70% year over year.

In general, people are using many online resources to learn to code, regardless of whether they are in college/university or not.

It was the time of the pandemic breakout and the same year before the start of the countrywide lockdown I completed high school. The colleges were not taking in any students as the time was hard and universities/colleges were shut.

I wondered why to waste a lot of time and started to casually browse what I can learn, to be honest, I started with Photoshop first but it seemed to be very slow and unexciting eventually after trying out a few things I came across the basic HTML and CSS.

I thought the websites in the whole world use the same 2 things but gradually I was kinda wrong about this 😂 well obviously these are the basic things but a tonne of things are there that need to be taken care of.

I practiced HTML & CSS for around 6 months well that's too much but as I told you my assumption hahaha!

My Experiences

I come under the self-taught developer gang. 😅😎

I started to learn to code back in 2020 a tough time for everyone around the world.

Initially, I didn't know what to do so I started with YouTube tutorials in C language. I didn't find C language much beginner-friendly ( I haven't learned that language yet😅 ).

Eventually, I found this site called Freecodecamp [FCC]. Where I started with the curriculum they recommended, without thinking much about it.

Slowly and Steadily, I completed the first certification (Responsive Web Designing [HTML, CSS]) and moved on to the next course which was about JavaScript where I learned a lot. Once that was completed. I began researching what to do next. and I got to know that something called React is becoming very popular.

I wanted to learn Reactjs but I lost track. Why??
well! maybe cuz I had no one to report my progress to or maybe cuz I faced errors and I had no one to share it with(there are lots of communities but still if there is a mate beside you it makes a huge difference) so I left the project/challenge there and dived into web-series and gaming, procrastinating a whole day.

I lost the consistency back then. I did reach the intermediate level in Reactjs, but that was only possible just because I used to reward myself if was able to complete the daily task ( I call it a daily mission sounds more fun yeah? 😄😅 )

Every night before sleep I used to set the tasks (mission) and just take a glimpse of it the next morning.

Rewards!!
What did I reward myself with?? 🤔

The greater the difficulty of the task (mission), the better the reward will be.

I used to reward myself with:

• Watching 2 to 3 full episodes of an ongoing web series.
• Gaming for a specific amount of time (amount is not disclosed cuz it was high I think [2-3 hrs.] I am lying probably 😆😅).
• Hanging out with friends/family.

Rewards & Rules can both be set by you and following them is your choice at the end of the day and that's why discipline is very important.

I'm now concerned about the article's length 😅. Thus, it would be better if the next article covered the rest of the part. Dev Community won't say no to that [hehehe 🤗🙂]

Stay happy, Keep hustling
Signing off Meet Bhalodiya,

Peace ✌