My first year of programming

Already, it's been already a year and a half I had my first coding experience and... what a journey !

Even it's only a small step, it's feeling like being already miles away from my starting point and this is what I've done during this time.

First Week:

Everything's been interesting so far, from learning to use loops, to conditions, my first bug encounter, first commits, he really seems I'm in love with my first coding week, I'm doing JS, HTML, CSS, I type code and I see stuff in my browser it's awesome.

First Month:

My first team project is done, a really simple website, with just plain HTML, CSS and JS, nothing fancy but still, how pleased I am to have achieve something like that in just a month with my teammates, at that time I feared using too many branches, I named them randomly using who's been working on the branch and stuff, it was a real mess.

First quarter:

I've been doing React all day, everyday, learning how components works, how to handle states, what are API, how to work with them, I did my first web app, a simple game super hero game using a third party API, not bad.

First semester:

I've done my first fullstack application using React, Express and mySQL, learned a new language for my first internship PHP, learning a new language has been both easier than I first thought and allowed me to learn new way to code, new way to think about my program, here come's the OOP and my first clean code readings.

First year:

I've graduate from my bootcamp, finished my first internship with really good feedbacks from my manager, find out that maybe our fundamentals while bootcamp graduate where a bit "light" and so I've studied OOP, data structures, algorithms, I've been doing a lot of exercises to practice and fill the gap in my computer science knowledge.

Today:

And here I am, I work now as a graduate software engineer for a startup, I learned a lot about clean code, software craftmanship, software architecture, I still try to improve as most as possible my fundamentals whereas it's algorithms, core software engineer, or subjects like Domain Driven Design or clean architecture, I now understand that what make a developer is not the language he use, but he's fundamental, he's thinking, that's why I now want to work as much as possible on my core programming skill, that will be of use for my whole career.

What in the future:

I really think, that investing in the rights set of skills today could make a huge difference on your career, learning skills that apply for every programming language are really my main focus today, I also think that skills like devops, system design would be very well worth the investment.

Final words:

If like me, you always wanted to work as a programmer, but just kind of lost your tracks, don't lose hope, it's just absolutely impressing to step back and see what we can achieve in just a single year, with a good mix of passion and hardwork, and don't forget, we are not in a sprint, we are here for the long run :D