My struggles as a self-taught web developer

When I first started I thought I was the smarted person in the neighborhood but after 4 years discovered there's still a long way to go in the industry.

In 2017 I made my first commit on GitHub and didn't know what the heck I was doing, the same day I signed up with http://freecodecamp.org which is a very good start if you'll like to jump in and write your first "Hello World" line of code.

I couldn't afford a coding Bootcamp at the time. My strategy was to get on http://youtube.com/, watch video tutorials but instead spent most of my time on going from confused to impatient at the end frustrated because my code wasn't working as the instructor.

A whole year had passed and I was still unable to wrap my head around some basic concepts of programming. So I stayed in a safe zone and spent most of my time building dummy projects with HTML, CSS, and bootstrap with a dash of Javascript. Looking back this really helped.

Finally, I got my first job as a Front-End-Developer at a startup where I was introduced to React https://reactjs.org/ Remember I had no prior knowledge of any javascript framework and a very basic understanding of Javascript.

This made my first few months overwhelming until I tried redirecting my attention to from using and learning reactJS as I work to focus on vanilla Javascript... To my greatest surprise, it works!

Today my entire life as a developer revolves around the JS ecosystem. However, I still struggle with Javascript sometimes because programming is more about reading code than writing code.

Conclusion: If you are learning to code, or new to coding it is best you take the time to master a language before moving on or else you'll have to go back and basically relearn that language. I really hope this post helps someone out there and proves that your not alone -" If I can do it you can also ".