Right now I am twenty years old. I have been trying to teach myself development (web development, then application development, and now I am back to web development) for about 4 years. When I was in high school I got my first gaming PC and I discovered that PCs are multi-purpose tools. I discovered HTML and was surprised that it really is that easy to create a static web page. I was amazed at making words bold with the <strong> tag and making words big with the <h1> tag. In my senior year in high school, I took a 'web design' course. The web design course was for some reason taught by the school's business and marketing instructor. Most of the assignments I finished in a day when other kids took a week to complete them. At times I even felt like I knew more than the instructor. After this course, I thought I was a web development genius. Then I started looking online at things people had made and things people could do, I started looking at job postings and learned that I knew almost nothing.
By the time I was seventeen or so I had purchased a udemy course called the complete web developer bootcamp taught by Colt Steele. I started going through all of the modules and then for some reason I stopped.
By the time I was eighteen I got a job at an Amazon fulfillment center (a really bad place to work in my opinion). When working at Amazon they had internal wiki pages that people could make for themselves and I made a few and realized that that is what I want to do as a job. Web development. I needed to get back into it. I quit my job at the fulfillment center and enrolled in community college.
The first semester I took Intro to computer programming where we used Python, I took a class where we learned Oracle databases and SQL, and I took Computer Science I: C++. I easily got high marks in all of my classes and I did so for the rest of my semesters as well. The problem is that I didn't feel as if I was learning anything and I still don't.
I started to go back to the udemy course I mentioned earlier and felt that I was learning more valuable skills there than in school.
I have completed most of my requirements to graduate (all except four classes), but I still feel like I don't know what I need in order to get a development job.
Currently, I am still trying to learn development. I have been hung up on CSS lately and am working on my own framework called NimbleUI. I really do hope something comes of this because I am stuck and I feel like I have been going nowhere for the past two years.
Anyway, thanks for reading my first post. I hope to keep posting about anything development related as I continue to learn. Maybe even a dev log about NibleUI. ☕☕☕
Top comments (7)
Hey there. Thanks for posting, to be honest I recognize myself a bit in your post, in the way that I spent (and I'm still spending) a lot of time on learning materials. Have you trie d to invest times in personal projects / open source projects ? It works for me, as it enforces you not to spend to much time on sandboxes projects, but on real world projects instead, as you have to deal with deadlines, a community that manage a software etc.
Therefore I agree with the @Rofl Streefkerk comment ^^.
Some resources I found helpful:
Good Luck!
get a programming job, if you can paid, if you can't unpaid. The reason is simple, you'll learn the business side of programming and all the processes around it.
Programming is a lot more than just writing code and in a business you'll learn that.
Hey! I really love Colt Steele's class; back when I first started learning I found that class shoved me in the right direction and I heard he recently rereleased it with an all updated version which is pretty neat. Since then I've kinda moved more towards data science instead of web dev but it was definitely a great experience when I first started.
I think the best advice is to just keep pushing and never stop learning. It can get really hard sometimes and imposter syndrome is something we all go through but if you put in the work you will absolutely see the returns in time.
I'm 22 and when I was your age (not too long ago obviously lol) I was feeling a lot of the same uncertainties but I kept learning and practicing as best as I could and now two years later I've made a ton of progress.
Keep it up and you'll get there!!!
Please give a link to the NimbleUI repo. I'd like to take a look. Thanks! You will succeed!
Thanks for the encouragement! here is the repo: github.com/nicholasbus/NimbleUI
It is still very much a work in progress ☕☕
Hey bud, It's good to see that you are keeping your passion for learning alive. Go ahead. Best of luck!!