Table of contents
Intro
In the beginning three months at my first Web-Dev job, I have learned more about Web Development than I had in my whole two years of college. In the program specifically catered to Web & Digital Media.
That's not entirely the fault of the teachers I had though. Weekly assignments or final dev projects are good, but nothing will motivate you to get your ass into gear and learn like being under the pressure of deadlines in a job you just started.
First JavaScript Project
In my second month at my first web-development job, I was tasked with programming a battery calculator that would display how many hours of use certain types of batteries would give you, depending on which accessories and how many of them you would have connected to it.
This was a trial by fire, for someone who, until then, their only experience with JavaScript was making a button that displays text on a page, and that only half-worked. Luckily my coworkers knew that, they knew it was going to be challenging for me, and without them, there's no way I would have gotten that finished in time.
The code was messy, borderline unreadable, and riddled with notes about what each function did, but hey, it works. I just hope that the client never comes back with any big changes because while I might be able to look at my code, I would feel terrible if it got assigned to some other poor developer out there.
If you ask me, this was not the first time I should have had a big JavaScript project. This should have been something I struggled with in college. The program did a good job of getting me in better habits with HTML, and CSS, you know, learning the basics and getting the fundamentals down. But JavaScript is where I feel like the program was really underdeveloped.
Learning on my own
That brings me to the topic of this blog post. In my last semester at school, I was starting to look for jobs or internships and apply. But I would see the requirements and see things like "experience with React" or "Vue" and wonder what the hell those even were. Frameworks were something I was never taught or introduced to in school.
Something you have to understand is that I started the program at school right when the Covid-19 Pandemic started in 2020. The whole two years, I never had one in-person class, never met my teachers or colleagues in person. So my teachers were fairly unreachable about things like this, everyone was still getting used to going fully remote with these sort of things, and my classes were mostly asynchronous, meaning the lectures were just recordings my teachers had made.
This left a lot of the learning and question answering up to me.
I had heard commercials for online learning sites like skillshare and Udemy, and decided to try out a few courses to get a broader understanding of what web-development was like. in fact, In the week before I was assigned the big calculator project, I binged on JavaScript courses and lectures from Udemy, and Youtube. They were helpful, and got me to the point to where at least JavaScript didn't sound totally like a foreign language.
Now, in my downtime at work, I still continue the Udemy JavaScript course, and hope to finish it. I also have a chrome browser extension called daily dev that shows me articles people have written about different things pertaining to web development to introduce me to new tools and programs I would have never known about before.
My experiences taught me to be curious, if I don't know something, I should look it up. If I don't know how to do something, someone out there does, and they can teach me. Sooner rather than later, before I'm under the gun for a deadline...