Hello! This article isn't going to be technical as you've noticed from the title. It's going to be a bit personally too 😏.
I know they've been a lot of negativity doing the lock down period due to lost of jobs and the likes. But I've actually gained and learnt a lot during this time and still learning, so I'll be sharing what I've learnt or still learning because I can't say I've mastered it all.
Introduction
Firstly, I need to talk about what really began my learning phase which was Twitter. Being active on Twitter gave me a new perspective to the Web world which opened lots of opportunities for me. Seeing a lot of CSS Arts, Layouts and wondering how it was done really drove me learn. Then, I encountered #100DaysOfCode challenge, researched about it and decided to partake with the challenge.
Meanwhile, upon making researches on the challenge, I found out you'll at least code for an hour then post on Twitter what you've learnt or done. I also watched videos by people who had taken up the challenge and gave positive feedbacks on how it helped them.
Sadly my first attempt to the challenge failed due to online exams (as I'll like to say 🙂). After my exams and days of thinking if I should take the challenge again, I then decided to partake with the challenge once again and I'm currently still on it. You could follow my progress on Twitter.
What I've learnt so far and Achievements
Learnt the Importance of having a blog
If someone had told me last year I'll be thinking of writing or actually writing, I'll have denied it and said that wouldn't happen.
Well it happened, thanks to the DEV community on Twitter. Sadly I wasn't able to find the article that spoke to me to share my idea but it was an article from FreeCodeCamp. Having a blog and sharing ideas have made me confident from the little I know to be able to read JS more accurately due to continuous reading from other blogs to really understand what I want to write about.
Also, these days I read lots of blog post from others in order for me to view others perspective and learn from them.
I currently have 6 blog posts already (this will be the 7th and more to come) and I try to be consistent blogging every week. So far, I haven't missed a week since I started 😊.
Learnt about Responsive Layout
Before being active on Twitter and having meet 100DaysOfCode challenge, I took a free course "Conquering Responsive Layout" by Kevin Powell, this course was great as it opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing wrong and how I conquer different challenges.
The course is currenly open but with limited timing, click here to view the course
Learnt (still learning) about Git, GitHub and Contributing to Open Source
While taking up #100DaysOfCode challenge, I did some projects from frontendmentor.io which made me learn git more, so I could be able to host my solutions.
I recently started contributing to some open source community, mostly ZTM (Zero To Mastery) organization. ZTM is a platform for learning main instructor is Andrei Neagoie. I took a course on Web Development, which has a community on discord where challenges are given every month.
I've also contributed to other organization like Layer5
You could visit my frontendmentor profile to see what I've been up to.
Got access to GitHub Student Development Pack
I'm happy I got this even though I feel I'm wasting a lot of chances due to the numerous offers I was presented with.
One of the offers was FrontendMasters, it's a platform for learning and developing your web skills. I've taken several courses there already but the one I enjoyed most was Javascript: The Hard Parts v2. The instructor (Will Sentance) was excellent explaining and writing each steps on a black board. I got to know the concepts of how Javascript works and learn advanced terminologies. I'm writing on what I got out from the course here.
This is a highly recommended course to take to understand Javascript better. Apply to get your GitHub Student Developer Pack here if you're a studnet.
Communication
Due to my interactions with Twitter daily, I got to know some friendly developers. They've been helpful and inspiring making me want to be better at programming.
I'm an introvert, so I barely talk to people I don't know. But so far, I've opened up on issues I had and got solutions to those issues. Learning how to speak up is also a big factor for an upcoming program which I'm still improving on.
I mistakenly wrote I'm an extrovert instead of an introvert on my about me page. If you've seen it, it's a fatal mistake 😬. I'm still new to personality concepts.
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Here is an awesome library for animations while scrolling your screen and it's very easy to use. Check out my portfolio to see how I implemented it.
Learnt (still learning) about Tailwindcss
Tailwindcss has been awesome, it's a utility first framework that is totally customizable but could give headache something, lol mostly when you don't know how to make what you're doing work properly.
And so much more...
Conclusion
There probably more things I've learnt but just to mention a few, I'll stop here.
If you don't have a Twitter account, open one and join the Dev community by commenting, sharing your progress and so on. You don't have to partake at 100DaysOfCode if you're not up to the task just make yourself known as an aspiring developer in other to grow faster.
So I'll leave with this: reflect on what you've achieved during this period and stay positive.
Thanks for reading if you've read so far. Like, share and comments are welcomed, bye for now 🥰.
