At the beginning of my web development journey, I was told that it is better to share on a blog. I am hard-headed, so I thought I'd rather post here. I started by trying to learn on Freecodecamp, and Codeacademy. I was in love when I seen the difference linking a css style sheet into html compared to just a barebones html page.
Before I continue, I'd like to mention that I suffer from mental health issues. Namely, Bipolar Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and ADHD. Three years after I was diagnosed in 2014, I got into trying to learn how to do web development. In 2015 I had started the process of getting on disability and I figured I'd do web development as a hobby. I ultimately stumbled onto the Udemy Website and found myself buying the Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele. I started working on it and I had some difficulty, but nothing outside the norm. The ADHD side of me kicked in and well, I got distracted by outside things, namely gaming. After I got back to reality, I started back up again, plus I bought more courses... and yes, I know that tutorial hell is real. Angela Yu's Web Development Course and Andrei Neagoie's Zero to Mastery course were so juicy I couldn't resist.
Well enough about that, In 2022 I finally started to really make some strides in the course, which had since been revamped, so I restarted from the beginning. Slowly, I found myself enjoying the course and learning more about web development in ways that made sense. I won't lie, arrays are annoying, but once I got into Express and React, it was interesting. It's very nice going through and learning it. But towards the end, someone told me to watch the videos and then go back and practice them, so that's what I did.
Before finishing the course on Udemy, I decided to take the Git Course by Colt Steele and completed it. It has been a Godsend when it comes to keeping track of my files. I now have a Github account that is active (I keep pushing code to my projects).
I know that many of you will tell me the same thing, just code and you will learn more that way. I will definitely be doing that here now and in the near future. I just completed my first Frontend Mentor Challenge, and to be honest, I watched someone's youtube solution video after being frustrated. I did mimic what they did, but I found that it wasn't the solution I was looking for. So I did my best to replicate the challenge and I ran into some interesting snags.
Learning Padding versus Margin is probably going to take me a bit of time.
I was fiddling with both on this exercise, and boy, it was a doozy. One change made the card on that displayed the QR code look weird; it pushed the image to the side. I also learned more about rem's and how to calculate rem size for multiple elements. I got to fiddle around with box-sizing and flexbox. So many tools, I feel like Mr Gadget. Of course I was looking up stuff like mad in Chrome, maybe 20 tabs open with multiple things from MDN, W3C, CSS-Tricks and the like. I tell you, some of those sites are nice, others frustrated me. Mainly because I'm not as knowledgeable yet when it comes to web development. Reading Doc's on how to do stuff isn't my strong suit.
Learning to help others on the Frontend Mentor website and Discord will be nice once I get better. It's surprising how many people don't even take the time to read the files included in the challenge before setting off to do their solution. I was eyeballing that Figma file like a hawk, and i also included the styling information inside my CSS file for quick reference. It definitely made things easier. I'm such a perfectionist that I didn't stop working on the QR Code Challenge until I knew it was perfect. I even took the time to add meta tags, so that when I shared my link, it showed a title, description, and a thumbnail. I'm really proud of the work I achieved.
If you are out there and have mental health problems and are just starting out on this journey, I hope this post inspires you. If you are already on this journey, I hope this post encourages you to keep on trucking. Thanks again to FreeCodeCamp, Dev.to, Codecademy, Colt Steele, Angela Yu, and Andrei Neagoie, oh yeah, Zarko the TA on Udemy, thanks for taking the time to help me when I got stuck so many times. You are amazing!
Oh, and if you like, I'm going to share my first Frontend Mentor challenge here, so you can critique my work.