Last October 2019 I decided to start studying Web Development, some months after I discovered the #100DaysOfCode and thought it was going to be a good idea to add some extra motivation!

Hello everybody, my name is Juan Carlos I’m 37 and I'm from Málaga - Spain in the heart of the Costa del Sol.

My main hobby is to enjoy my family ☺️ and sports, I compete in endurance sports (Triathlon and Running) and I’m writing this post because I would like to share with you my story as a web developer.... in progress!

My knowledge about websites wasn’t exactly zero...

In high school, I was good at IT, the teachers recommended me to go for a computer engineering career, but for the whims of fate, my destiny was not related to programming and I studied sound engineering, music was my passion and it attracted more during that time.

Since then, even with a non specifically related IT job, I have been a product manager and import manager for 14 years in the wholesaler industry and during this time in charge of the IT side of the company, creating and maintaining e-commerce sites for different company branches and so, so I always have been around websites.

Also did some freelancing jobs during all these years, not big deals, but I always enjoyed doing them.

So after all this time, it felt like an unfinished and pending business I thought, let’s do this, let’s start Studying Web Development from scratch !

After finishing my first HTML5 + CSS3 course in February I already understood that this wasn’t gonna be a short path, I fully understood that it was going to be a long term project and it would take years to reach a decent level.

After this course, I took a month off to rest, and to decide which was going to be the next step, looks like JavaScript was going to be the best option.

In April in the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine in my country. I discovered Codecademy and Freecodecamp, I finished the responsive design courses at both sites, and then its when I discovered the #100DaysOfCode challenge.

So I started a Twitter account and decided to log my journey as daily motivation.

What I have studied during the #100DaysOfCode?

HTML5
CSS3
JavaScript
React
Bootstrap
Node.js
Git
SQL
TDD
PHP

What I have learned from this Journey ?

First of all, you don’t want to go too fast while studying to code. It takes time to understand some stuff. It’s something I discovered thru the challenge, the learning curve could be steep and going fast does not help at all and create a big frustration.

I took the Codecademy Web Developer path and the last part, React, Node.js, TDD was almost impossible to understand at that moment, it felt really bad.

So it's better to give small secure steps than go fast without sense, related to a sport similitude:

Learning PHP before JavaScript makes it easier to learn the second. This is my personal opinion. For somebody that never learned to code looks like the learning curve, it’s much less steeply. Loops, functions, forms, arrays felt much easier.

I have expended 33 days of the total of 100 with PHP.

During this time I discovered that PHP is the “Black Sheep” of the programming languages, of course, everybody has their own opinion about that, I from my complete lack of knowledge thought to give it a try if the 78,9% of websites in the world use this language looks like a good idea to learn it!.

Ask Ask Ask !

I discovered Stackoverflow, people there have an incredible desire to help and they are fast replying!

What will my path be in the future?

The journey does not end here, a short goal is to start a Theme in WordPress and later I will continue learning PHP and JavaScript and my idea is to continue in the future with Vue.js, TypeScript, and Laravel, but who knows, this profession changes so fast that you must be flexible and open-minded.

My Recommendation to all the Web Developers in progress

• Together We’re Stronger: Get into the #100DaysOfCode: You will find a lot of motivation from the dev community, use hashtags like #CodeNewbie you will find lots of people with similar interests.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for help!: You will find many resources online in which you will find people wanting to help.

• Don’t go too fast: Think about this is a long race or a long journey, it will take time, you don’t have to rush.

• Learn the basics correctly: Understand well the basics, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, before stepping into a Framework, remember, this is a long race.

And Remember that constancy is the secret of success.

Thanks for reading !, you will find me on Twitter [https://twitter.com/southsound_dev]