It has been four months since I started my journey to become a frontend developer at Technigo bootcamp. It has been a bumpy road with its ups and downs. Here are some tips I noted for myself that help me to even the tight turns and steep slopes of this rollercoaster called “Learning programming” !
My weekly cycle of ups and downs
During the introduction days one of the former students of the bootcamp warned us: “it is going to be tough journey with its good and bad moments!”. She also mentioned that we would probably cry a lot! My first thought was: “Oh, common! I am not a cry baby! I do not give up easily!”. I was wrong about the first part…
When we started with JavaScript in week four, I realised, I do not know anything although I did all the necessary pre-studies and took a number of free courses to prepare! But they were all theory! And applying them to a real life web applications was not so easy!
So, for the next 3 weeks I followed the same pattern! On Monday, when we start a new project with new JavaScript tasks I was panicking and feeling like a complete dummy who does not understand anything! And, yes, it made me cry … But then after two days of watching (and re-watching) the lecture materials, trying and failing, trying and sometimes succeeding with my code, I would start feeling: oh, I understood something! By Wednesday-Thursday, I would be feeling less and less of a dummy and more and more excited that my code works and I can see the result! By Friday-Saturday I would submit my project not just with basic requirements and but with all the stretch goals completed!
And then on Monday the cycle would reset itself ….
It is okay not to know everything!
After couple of weeks of this craziness and being so hard on myself for not knowing everything, I realised: it is okay! I am learning a new profession! I have never done programming before! Couple of months ago I did not know anything about JavaScript! But now I am LEARNING! So, it is okay not to know everything when you start learning some new topic! It is okay to fail at first!
Now, I also understand that if I keep trying, if I keep learning, if I keep working and not giving up, I will succeed! I will manage to understand what is the difference between array.forEach() and array.map()! I will know what conditional rendering is and how to use it my React application! I will understand asynchronous functions and how and why I need to use them!
All of this was a complete mystery to me couple of weeks ago, but not anymore! Because I did not give up and kept digging!
It is okay to google for more information! Google is my friend!
So, now I do not have that feeling of being a dummy on Mondays, I just start digging deeper into the topic! If I still do not understand what is going on after watching the lecture materials or reading suggested literature, I start googling!
There is so much free material out there! It is amazing! I google and search for tutorials or reading materials that would manage to break down complex issues to the chunks I can understand! Sometimes just looking at how other people solved the issue makes it click in my brain and I immediately understand what I need to do in my project! Sometimes just typing in your project what other people did gets me to the point where the whole topic of the week starts making sense!
At the end of the day, I always manage to find the materials that help me better understand the problems and find solutions!
It is okay to ask for help!
However, when I am truly stuck with my code and no amount of googling or debugging help, I ask for help! It took me some time to understand, there is no embarrassment in asking for help! Again, I am learning, I have not encountered that problem before, so, it is okay to tell it out loud and say: I need help with this issue!
We are lucky to have great code coaches at our bootcamp, but also great students who probably faced the same issue! So I just shout out loud into our Slack and StackOverflow groups that I need help with this issue!
When I do not get help in the community, there is the whole world out there to help! StackOverflow is an amazing platform to ask for help! So, instead of feeling frustrated and crying, instead of being afraid that I will fail, I ask help! And that is okay!