Coding

Or: how we finished bootcamp with a React social media platform So, this is it! Bootcamp over, certification in the mail - you are now a full-stack web developer. And to be honest - that is really, really cool. I think most of us who have built their last projects are happy that the 24 weeks are over - it took a lot of time and effort from us that we spent coding and studying and worrying about coding and studying - it is nice to do something else for a change in our freetime other than that. But by no means do I want to suggest that I did not enjoy it - because I really, really did. ...

And so it begins - after waiting for almost six months, anticipation, and yes, in the last week or so - stress (almost), Day 1 of my Web Development Bootcamp experience is drawing closer. On November 29th I will sit in the “remote campus” (aka my home in front of my screens) and will receive my first ever face-to-face (Screen-to-screen?) lesson on web development. So far in my learning-how-to-code-career it went from reading books to reading other books to reading StackOverflow to Google to Udemy (a bit) to CS50 (for 20 minutes) to listening to podcasts to video tutorials (mostly by Wes Bos) - to here. ...

I remember the first time I ever heard about Wes Bos - I was probably putting our kid down for a midday nap, and in order not to be anxious to get out of there, I put in a podcast. I was fairly new to podcasts, but I had found one that was called CodeNewbie, and that seemed to really scratch an itch I had, namely: I don’t know anybody who either is a coder, works in programming or has any knowledge about it (other than a colleague who I couldn’t talk to because of work hours). ...

I don’t know exactly when I decided to switch to Linode for Web Hosting - I can’t pinpoint the day or anything, but certainly I remember WHY I did it. But let’s back up a bit. Since I started coding (which seems AGES ago, but arguably for real that was in the last nine months) I wanted a webpage or website that I made accessible for the public - either via my Synology or a proper domain. Now, as you could read here, our ISP does not have public IPs available (and is currently still working on providing IPv6 addresses) which makes a pbulicly accessible solution for web hosting via the Synology no possible. So what I instead did was just tinker with web page building on localhost (I first installed XAMPP after reading about it in Paul McFedries’ book and ran simple index.html files there), basically just exercising clunky html writing, early style sheet stuff etc. ...

Can you relate with this weird state of mind, where you fixate on an idea and stress yourself out over nothing in particular? No deadlines, just your own drive? I’m guessing, everyone had that at some point in their lives. For a week at the end of October I almost did nothing else on the computer other than WordPress. Sure, I checked mails and such, but I didn’t do any exercises, tutorials, I didn’t code on a website project - I only went to the WordPress site of an NGO I am part of, and fired up the staging website. ...

“Fun” seems to be THE thing when it comes to coding for me. Because it makes me happy, because it is fun, and so on, recursive logic yay. Right next to “Fun”, or somewhere close AND diametrically opposed is “Frustrating”, which learning new things can and will absolutely always be. In the last day (and night) and day I had the absolute pleasure to delve a bit deeper into the Odin Project foundations and play around with Flexbox. I had worked with it before, when I coded along “Head First HTML & CSS”, and did not at all know what I was doing. (As and aside: I learned some super rudimentary stuff at that time and set up a webpage on the local LAMP server, which centered around my cat. And I wanted to make it look neat, and what do you know - five minutes later I am deep into the rabbit hole on something about a Grid or a Flexbox, which at that time thought that was some kind of hack.) ...