I make my living maintaining the website for a community college. I do mostly front end type of work, which leaves me craving the olden days of my previous job where I did the backend work of programming and creating database tables. I have wanted to create a side project for a while now, and I felt it was time I update my skill set.
Ready for a challenge, the next big question is what my project should be? I have two young children and limited time for my professional development. Not until having kids did I realize how much time I spent after work researching and updating my technical skills. Because of these time constraints, I have to be strategic on what I focus on learning.
How I choose what to learn
Whenever I need to spend a substantial amount of time or possibly even some money learning a new skill, I ask myself the following.
- Will this skill help me with my current work?
- Will this skill help me promote?
- Can this skill be used towards a career pivot?
If I can answer yes to at least the first two, I then ask
- How quickly can I start to incorporate the new skill into my work?
- Can I create a low investment proof of concept project to solidify the new knowledge?
All signs pointed to JavaScript
I have coded in JavaScript in the past, and futz around with some jQuery, but it has been a while that I have created anything from scratch. Having a laundry list of interactive features I wanted to add to the campus website I knew I had to update my JavaScript skills.
I listened to a podcast with Quincy Larson, the creator of freecodecamp.org. Everything Quincy said resonated with me. His mission/belief system on making learning accessible and free. I signed up to try it out and see how the site works. It’s not the most spectacular interface, but it’s simple, and it works. The concept of research and reaching out to figure out how to solve a problem was excellent. The research process is a large part of coding. Since I already had experience with JavaScript, going through the exercises was like having an excellent refresher course. I started to listen to other coding podcasts, many with Quincy on them, and Node.js came up a lot. Not only is Node.js being used by a lot of tech giants in silicon valley but the idea of server-side JavaScript was interesting. If I can get a solid foundation in JavaScript that can translate to Node.js. Also, since JavaScript is Object Oriented, spending my time on JavaScript will help me when I do more projects with asp.net. I prefer C# to VB by the way.
Teaching myself JavaScript, aka I like pictures 🙂
Besides using freecodecamp.org as a JavaScript refresher, I wanted to think of ways to make all my JavaScript study stick in my brain. I wanted to write down my notes on paper and pen and get out of the digital world for a little while. I know, crazy right. “But you need to use a computer to code” you may say. But I still need to learn theory and vocabulary. I understand the concepts I read, but my downfall is my horrible memory. There is a saying “I know enough to be dangerous.” That has been me all my life. I can figure something out, but I can never explain it to another technical person because I can’t remember the right terms. If I see an example, I can recreate it and figure out new ways to use it. But then! I can’t remember what its called!! GAAAAAHHHH!! Damn you brain! I had recently started to get back into creative note-taking. It’s the way I took notes during high school and college. I stopped once I got a job and didn’t have to sit and listen to lectures. I still made flowcharts and task lists to complete projects, but the old creative me was pushed out for flowchart/task list me.
I thought if I could use my creative side to make myself some beautiful notes it would help me remember JavaScript better. That also meant I would need to buy some new colored pens >_> I saw some cool erasable ones and a lovely journal.
Teaching other people
After deciding that I was going to make myself some graphics heavy notes to learn JavaScript, I thought “This may help other people who are visual learners to learn JavaScript too.” OMG YES!! That is what I will do. And I will make a website!! OMG!! YES AND YES! And that will give me a reason to have a side project which I needed because I wanted to do something for me! Check and check and check!
So that is how I decided to create a website to teach JavaScript coding principles. My next step is the researching and creating content.