Reviewing my own knowledge and filling in the gaps.

It has been six days since I have made the commitment to launch myself into the job market for web development. I gave myself a deadline up until the end of July this year to be paid to code. So what has happened since?

First thing I did was sitting down with a blank page in my notebook and took around 2 hours to really measure out the gaps in my knowledge and sketch out a roadmap of the next three months. I did this by writing down everything that I felt uncertain of and all the things that I have been putting off learning. Again, I had overestimated myself and one page turned into two, two turned into five and not much time went by before I realized that many things I had learnt weren't there anymore. So I came to the conclusion that I should start from the beginning (yes, the very beginning) and go through the basic stuff to refresh my knowledge. After that made a list of subjects that I want to gain a deeper understanding in and finally I started the quest of finding a resource to acquire said knowledge.

After a day of research, I had decided to sign up and to Frontendmasters and follow their learning paths and make projects along the way. For a long time, I tried to avoid paying for an education but I felt that it would save me time making myself curriculum and I had heard many good things about the course structure. At $39 per month it is quite pricey (at least for me) but I decided to give it a shot anyway.

The very beginning was a little boring and I sped through the first eleven hours of lectures at 1.4x speed and stopped when there was something that caught my attention. It was an intro course aimed at complete beginners covering a whole lot of subjects in a very brief manner. As boring as it was for me, I still found it very useful to make a structure in my head.

After that, I took two days to fool around and make something. It surprised me how much more I was capable of after just one day of going through the stuff I knew but had sort of forgotten. In those two days, I made a landing page for a fake cryptocurrency ( still needs finishing) and started on my portfolio page. The pages were dead simple and I am sure that mistakes were to be found on many lines of code, but it felt great just making something again.

After that, I took up diving deeper into JavaScript to set myself up for learning React and re-learning Node. Today I went through 2 hours of Karl Simpson's JavaScript intro course. Most of the material I was already confident with but again it felt great to crystalize my knowledge while taking notes. Over the weekend I will try to marathon my way through up until the point where I don't feel as knowledgable.

A summary and a write up of what I learnt this week will be posted this weekend when I don't need to be up at 5 am for work. Have lovely night folks and keep grinding.