It's that time of the week folks. So wonderful code newbies, what did you learn this week? It could be programming tips, career advice etc.
Feel free to comment with what you learnt and/or reference your TIL post to give it some more exposure.👇👇🏻👇🏼👇🏽👇🏾👇🏿
Top comments (6)
This week was jam-packed, and I learned so many things!
The key thing that I learned is that it's okay to take things slowly.
I am currently working through the Foundations path of The Odin Project. While working on one of the exercises, I realized that I wasn't really understanding how to do what I needed to. I was more so typing random things, hoping that they'd work and being confused when they didn't. I had worked through all the lessons as directed, but it was clear that I had some big gaps.
To rectify this, I'm now working my way through the W3Schools CSS Tutorial, starting from the beginning and going lesson by lesson. At first, I was reluctant to do this because I just wanted to get through the Foundations path so I could get to the fun stuff, but I realized that speeding through wasn't a good strategy.
I've now dialed things back, and I'm learning a lot and writing higher quality HTML/CSS.
I totally relate to always wanting to "get to the fun stuff"-- am totally guilty of this! 😅 I think a good mix is important. Properly learning the basics is definitely critical but "getting to the fun stuff" and seeing the fruits of your labor is also paramount to maintaining proper motivation and not feeling burned out. Gotta get a positive feedback loop going for that sweet endorphin hit! 😀
I recently saw this diagram from Ben Congdon (they're getting younger and younger!) which is a good mental model for this, actually:
We "explore" so we can "exploit." And then when we get bored, we return to "exploring" something new again. Haha, in this sense, "CodeNewbie" is all of us... all of us are eternal, perpetual "CodeNewbies" in our heart of hearts! 🥳
This week I met a new study buddy (Hi @anitabe404 ! 👋) and together we've formed a study group and are powering through 30-days (or 100-days!) of code! We are three consecutive days in! 🥳
The study group itself is nothing fancy-- just a simple GitHub project board with seven columns, one for each day). But having this central location to post my daily progress, screenshots, questions/concerns, and knowing that everyone can see what I'm doing makes me feel accountable. Coding/learning can be a solitary/lonely endeavor. But this day and age in 2021, it doesn't have to be! 😀 So a thousand thanks to Anita for joining-- hopefully in the future, we can get even more people onboard. It'll be a celebration of collaboration and learning together!! 🎉
Three days in... 97 more days to go! 🚀
Yeah, they’re pretty amazing. A great example is theming. In fact the site you’re on right now uses CSS variables to handle changing themes!