Tuesday, April 12, 2016

My First Post: Why I Started to Code



In this post, I would like to briefly introduce myself and tell you why I decided to become a programmer.

My name is David and I love to learn new things and meet new people. A couple of years ago, I graduated from law school and start working as a lawyer. At the law school I did a lot of extracurricular activities since I was very interested in the law. I always thought (surprisingly) that I am going to be a successful lawyer one day. However, after a few years of working in the legal field, I have begun to have doubts about the direction of my career.


I felt that the legal job was not satisfying to me anymore.


So I decided to look into other fields which I found interesting. I checked some online course on sites such as Coursera, edX and Udemy. Because I love cooking, I enrolled in the Science & Cooking first. This course was great and I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to learn science that lies behind the creation of delicious meals. However, this course was just a hobby for me.

When I was searching for other online courses, I came across many programming-related courses. First, I was likeHow can I possibly code? I said goodbye to sciences after finishing high school and I was happy for that.” Nevertheless, I bought one of the courses – The Web Developer Bootcamp - which was kind of a new at that time and was aimed (as the title suggests) on front-end as well as on back-end web development. 


This was the moment, when my journey to become a web developer began.



As I went through this course and experienced coding in HTML, CSS and in JavaScript, it was a brand new feeling for me. “Wow, I can now create something from nothing which can be even useful. Plus I don’t have to memorize tons of information to be able to do that.” It was primarily this creative process which is involved in programming that excited me the most. The added value of this particular course was also a Gitter room where I could chat with other students and get more coding tips.

When I finished the JavaScript part of the course, I was thinking that I am learning some really cool new stuff but I was thirsty for more practical exercises. And then I have discovered the Free Code Camp, the site which purpose is to teach you how to code by doing tons of exercises.

It seemed to me that The Web Developer Bootcamp and Free Code Camp were two puzzle pieces fitting together – theoretical background + tons of exercises.


These two courses became basis for my journey to become a web developer.
 

Web Developer Bootcamp


 
Free Code Camp

At the time of this writing, it has been already a couple of months since I have written my first HTML tag. As every self-taught programmer (at least I hope it is not just me!), I know how challenging learning to code can be. This is also one of the two reasons why I started this blog. Although, I am not an absolute beginner, I hope I can convey to all of you, through my future blog posts, an original perspective on how to successfully learn to code.

Via this blog I also want to share challenges I am going through every day from the beginning of my coding journey as well as projects I am working on and other programming-related topics.



To sum up, two reasons that lie behind the creation of this blog are:
sharing my experience, projects and ideas 
document my coding journey

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