It was a cold morning/afternoon, I don't really remember what time of day it was, but it was a great day regardless, because I just found my pathway to easy riches...Or so I thought. As soon as I wrote my first line of HTML, I was off to the races. I got the hang of HTML in thirty-minutes. I got my first first h1, and first p tags to do their thing, and I successfully rendered a heading and a few paragraphs onto the page. Then it was time for CSS, I got the gist of that pretty quickly as well. I changed the font and text-color on my h1, set the size and margin, of an image I rendered, I was ecstatic. I thought to myself, "Wow, could web design, really be this easy?"
Then it came time to learn some JavaScript, the all-powerful language which breaths life into a web page; so when I typed in the famous "console.log('hello, world')," I thought that was pretty cool too, little did I know, I was in for a rude awakening...What in the world is a function? What is a parameter? An argument? How do those relate to functions? "What?! I thought I typed that in right? What's with the red red squiggly lines appearing everywhere?"
"what do you mean 'pizza is not defined?!' gahhhh!"
You get the picture, so many moving parts and so much syntax, how in the world am I supposed to remember all of that? So now I started to question myself, and that horrible demon they call imposter syndrome reared its ugly head, and I thought to myself that I could never learn JavaScript. Now by no means have I mastered the language to this day, I still have much to learn, but when I compare myself to my past self when I couldn't even understand how variables worked, I know now that I am lightyears ahead of where I was, when I wrote my first line of JS code. Now I can manipulate the DOM, render images and text, fetch data from an API; these were all concepts that were foreign to me when I first started. But how did I learn all that complex stuff? Well at first it was a struggle, because I had a poor approach to learning. In my program I would spend too much time on a code problem without asking for help and would find myself falling behind. And instead of really trying to understand the logic behind the powerful language which is JavaScript, I relied on memorization. I thought if I could just memorize the syntax I would be golden. Boy, I was wrong.
Memorizing syntax is a waste of time, it gets you nowhere, of course I initially relied on this method because in high school and in university, that is how I got by, but learning to code is a whole different animal. It takes practice and persistence. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. So if there is anyone out there struggling to learn JavaScript (I am sure there is) just remember to practice as much as you can, because it will click, and things will become more natural. I am proud of the progress I have made to this day, but I am still just a beginner. But it is important to always maintain a beginner's mindset when learning complex languages like JavaScript, because there is always more to learn, as a humble student of the craft it is my goal to become a 'black belt developer' to hone these amazing skills and make waves in the world of web, and app design.