What was your greatest "aha" moment?

For me, I distinctly remember when something clicked for me about how data is used in a template to render a page.

It's hard to describe how I didn't quite understand this, but I knew well how to create an HTML page by typing the HTML up myself. I even know how to do some JavaScript to manipulate that — but I really didn't have a concept of how server code worked to create the dynamic content I saw on a page.

But learning more about software in a non-web context gave me a much better grip of how things actually worked, and then when I came back to web I definitely felt some things click. Now there are different paradigms for how things actually happen — static site generation, APIs, whatever. But just figuring out how any of it could work is a big victory.

when i truly understood the python For loop logic. Amazing moment for me😊

The moment I understood how rendering worked in React and the "virtual DOM" — I can't say I really understood the non-virtual DOM, but something clicked when I figured this out and I really leveled up.

I learned for loops on vanilla Javascript for months and it didn't click until I learned Nodejs.
I think I didn't get it for so long because I didn't have any idea and couldn't picture it in my head on when and how to use it in a real world project 😅

When I was first introduced to the concept of recursion, I had trouble wrapping my head around it. I understood the basic rules, but it still did not click. So, I decided to try writing it down - I would start with an easy recursive function and write down what it would return. I think that being able to visualize how recursive calls get down to the base case and then that's when you start returning values all the way back to the original recursive call on paper helped me to understand recursion a little better.

Sometimes tracing code on paper can help you understand what is going on!

I remember things clicking for me with how to structure my HTML and CSS the second time I did projects in my Skillcrush class!

Years later, and I'm working on it all again (and the new projects and lessons) and the most recent click for me was just watching the page build out as I work out the CSS and seeing how I work through problems by myself before I look for help or dig too deep into the solution code. Yay!

When I understood how arrays work. In C language, arrays can hold multiple values and by definition variable can hold only one value at a time so how arrays manage to achieve this was the biggest question for me at that time.

When I first opened up the dev tools and was able to write JavaScript code in the console. It kind of clicked how JavaScript worked in the browser.

Concept of recursion in programming... at CS50 Edx :)