I have lots of commitments that I'm currently juggling, but one of the things that is always on the list is to augment my knowledge of coding languages. I already have some experience with a few coding languages, but the gaps in my knowledge are noticeable as well.

So when I chanced upon the Free Code Camp website, I thought I should give the certifications a go because the courses seemed comprehensive.

About Free Code Camp

It is a nonprofit organization that hopes to make coding accessible to everyone. I don't think the level is that deep, it kind of just touches the surface for most of these languages.

There are quite a lot of Certifications offered on the site, and, currently, I'm primarily interested in:

• Front End Development Certification
• Data Visualization Certification
• Back End Development Certification

Each of the certification purports to be of ~500 hours, and I'll be racing to see how fast I can finish them. I certainly don't intend to spend 1.5k hours on all of them!

Commitment

I'll be reporting my progress from time to time to keep myself in check and make sure I finish what I set out to do. I'll also record down interesting things I've learnt to help me retain concepts and to make it easy to look back on in the future. I'll, of course, be making notes on the side as well that will not be published.

Some Thoughts about FCC So Far:

Good Learning Environment

• The layout with explanation on the left, coding page in the middle, and output on the right was very helpful for the learning process.
• Coding page works well, with very helpful color coding.
• The keyboard (ctrl + enter) shortcuts was really helpful in advancing through the stages quickly.
• The display on the RHS shows all your coding changes instantly, so I could quickly see what impact my code had.

Pacing - Time/Investment Reward Ratio

The course kind of forces you to progress linearly through it. So it ends up being quite unhelpful and irritating when I'm forced to do something mundane that does not add to the learning.

For example, in this stage below:

you are asked to add 6 id tags, each with the form:

id="targetx" with x being an integer in 1 to 6.

• And after that, you're asked to add button tags of a specific format for each of the 6 buttons as well.
• I definitely did not learn anything from that and it wasted quite a disproportionate amount of time.

But I might be asking for too much. Already, at this point, I've been introduced to things that I didn't even know of before - Bootstrap and Font Awesome - despite having seen quite a lot of material on CSS. I'm not a developer and am not intending to be one so I've never used CSS extensively before, but it still took me long enough to get introduced to these things!

Next up: jQuery

jQuery is apparently "the most popular JavaScript tool of all time".