I am Isha, and hellbent on becoming a programmer. What made me so was reading about recursion in eloquent.js and being able to reason through and design functions for problems on my own. Discovering how the screen i see is not a monolithis structure and how every click is handled through events is so exciting. It is like standing behind a stage and seeing the tricks of a magician.
Warning 
: It is a pretty long ramble about learning.
For this whole year, I have been learning programming. Particularly Js. Now I am taking it seriously. There are various approaches that I tried:
- FreeCodeCamp’s JS course in January
- University of Helsinki course for Python
- Eloquent Js in April
- Javascript.online.
The last resource is what I am doing right now, and after frying my brain with it, I am writing this post.
I will explain my reasons for everything.
1. FreeCodeCamp
The general recommendation I got was to learn it through freeCodeCamp. - I quit it. I remember feeling disappointment that I was not learning much by just doing what they were telling me.
- There was not enough theory just some instructions.
- I wasn’t interested in projects.
2. Eloquent JS
It was hard. Theory was beautiful; exercises hell. - I quit because I could not solve any exercises beyond 2nd chapter.
- I thought I was stupid.
- There were no projects. Technically, there was a robot.
After quitting the book, I took a long break. I got a book about functional programming with Miranda and it has excellent pedagogy(miranda is dead.) I encountered a problem that I wanted to solve. Asked Claude how to do it and stared at the code that it returned(Typescript).
To be able to build it, I need to know events, classes, some more functions, loops perhaps or conditionals, async, await, this, objects. I have also discovered an open-source startup that uses React and I want to contribute to it. So this time around I have two projects I am interested in.
I thought I needed to just read javascript.info in a day or two to be familiar with syntax (I had never visited it, in my defense). The goal was to then go and build my project. Then yesterday I read the first article and realized, okay, I need to give it 3 full days every week.
3. Javascript.info
I skipped the basics part and landed on objects.
- This time I am reading and writing the code from memory in a browser compiler. Then doing exercises and explaining concepts by writing short summaries.
- So far I have covered the objects part. In the next section, I need to write some loops and functions, and I need to go back to basics.
I have a few questions mostly for myself.
The hypothesis of mine that I can, with breaks, do this whole day.
Is what I am learning here transferable to my project? Or am I repeating my mistake of eloquent.js here?
Am I leading myself to burnout by writing summaries, doing exercises of the topics I won’t likely encounter in my project?
To be able to build, I need to know handle events, classes, some more functions, loops perhaps or conditionals, async, await, this, objects,
This time, I want to build and not quit.
What would you do differently given my experience?
