Learning Javascript - My Journey Begins Here

All journey starts as the fool's journey.
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6 years ago I was in a park, learning how to juggle. Anyone who ever tried learning how to juggle knows how much of a fool you look like when you start juggling. I couldn't keep the balls in the air and I bent over for hours picking up the balls that fell.

But after a few hours, I was able to notice that I was getting a little better than when I started.

3 years and 30hours/week of practice later, I was doing street performances, spitting fire, juggling and entertaining crowds in my home province.

I later moved on to other things but I'm incredibly grateful of what the discipline of juggling taught me:

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"I can learn anything, no matter how difficult or complex, if I apply the correct attitude and learning strategies"

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Right now, I suck at coding. I really do. But so was every great devs at one point when they started coding. It's just part of the price to pay to get a new skill. In one of my previous blogpost, I saw people in the comments saying: "I wish but I don't think I could". I'm sorry to break it to you but that's just a lame excuse. You either don't want it enough (which is fine) or give yourself an excuse because of your lack of confidence in your ability to learn something new.

I imagine thousands of people capable of learning how to code but too afraid to step out of their comfort zone out of fear to look like a fool. That is a terrible lost to the world. If you are one of those people, get your head out of your a** and get started...the world needs more coders.

Everything Complicated Is Made of Simple Building Blocks

That's one thing that I've learned from juggling. Whenever I was faced a new pattern of juggling with 3,4 or 5 balls, the first thing I did was to decompose it into it's most simple elements.

I practiced the simple elements or patterns one by one until I got them figured out enough to combine them together.

I don't see how code is different from this. (correct if I'm wrong devs!)

If you can learn simple things very well and slowly learn how to combine them in new ways through practice, you can learn to do pretty much anything.

Structured Learning

I see a lot of people having poor learning strategies...and then get discouraged when they don't remember certain concepts they've learned the week before.

It's easy to go through a course at record speed and then be left out not remembering half of what you've learned. But remembering and integrating everything you've learned requires that you have a strategy to integrate your learning.

Here is an example of what I do in term of "structured learning":

In previous modules I learned about HTML and Bootstrap/CSS and yesterday I learned about while and for loops, functions, return, console.log, etc

I created a project called "Portfolio", where I'm attempting to build a personal portfolio website with everything I learned so far. While I am learning about Javascript, I still have to practice my HTML/CSS so that I don't lose it in the process of learning something new.

This morning, I'm going to go over my notes and type out some exercices to remember what I've just learned yesterday in javascript. Unfortunately, I am not far enough into javascript to integrate it into my portfolio website but as soon as I can I will!

If anything, by doing this, I'm teaching to integrate my learning into something practical while not forgeting the first thing that I've learned.

Conclusion

Are you interested in me sharing what I'm learning in the process of becoming able to create websites on top of the steem blockchain? Let me know in the comment below.

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash