Dev journal part 1: In the beginning...
Tags: devjournal, codenewbie
Published: 2022-11-20 10:24:39

Hello! Hola! Wilkommen! and welcome to my first ever dev journal entry.

In this journal I hope to document my journey into the mysteries world of web development.  This is going to be a bumpy ride so strap your down, this is as good as it gets!

To start with, I failed at school.  Like really FAILED.  Here in England, we have GCSEs as our basic educational requirement, and I failed every one of them! Not a good start to life.  I could have passed them, but I was one of the "cool" rebel kids without a cause.  It's only after you left school that you realise how damaging this is for your future. How it limits your opportunities and prospects, and ultimately this forces you into the world of manual labour or slave labour as I like to think of it.
  
Not to be discouraged and determined to double down I committed myself to this life of: 'lift the heavy box, put it there', 'push the overloaded container full of potatoes onto the lorry' and 'breakdown recycling with my bare hands' etc etc.  Not a pleasant life I can assure you.

The months pass. Then years. Then a decade or two, (where does it all go?) and BOOM!  A stolen car crashes into me whilst I'm driving to work one Christmas.  I'm okay. The other driver makes a run for it and is never caught.

Laying in hospital after a near death experience gives you a remarkable amount of time to think and reflect on your life. 
 It's like a system reboot on a computer and your brain is working through all the updates of your life and the events of the near disaster.  What if I had been killed? or maimed? or seriously injured in another way? What would the product of my life have been?  From these questions I concluded that I must endeavour and commit to change and growth beyond the limited boundaries I had imposed on myself.  

So, I returned to education to retake some of those failed GCSEs.  Not an easy decision.  Off I went first to learn Mathematics, then English literature, and finally Biology. It took two years but I finally passed them!  One small step for Andrew, one giant leap towards web development, for it was during this time I began look at coding/programming/web-development in general.

"Finally!" you must be thinking "he's actually going to start writing about the web development!". Yes, dear reader, yes, we are finally here at the beginning of the beginning, for it is not the beginning of the journey at all because my first experience of computer programming was, shock reveal, in Unreal Engine.

I know, the ultimate betrayal.  You were promised web development but trust me we are going to get there soon.

So, during the dark days of lockdown in England and whilst finishing my GCSEs I began watching and experimenting with YouTube video on Unreal Engine.  By experimenting I mean I downloaded the Unreal Engine software and began playing around with it like building Frankenstein's monster, following the instructional videos to build environments, textures, structures and avatars.

As you will know, YouTube has a clever algorithm that recommends similar and associated videos for you to watch and from this I transitioned away from Unreal content and into HTML and CSS content.  I downloaded Visual Studio Code, began building things from YouTube videos like a navbar as an example.  I then watched a video by FreeCodeCamp and that changed my direction from novices playing around with code to actually following an online self-study program.  FreeCodeCamp have a number of self-study course covering Frontend and Backend development and is FREE! so is a highly recommended starting point if you want to get a first taste of a more structured course. So, I enrolled and completed the Responsive Web Design course which is HTML and CSS (I recommend this course for newbies), learned about GitHub and Frontend Mentor through independent research and some Frontend developers on YouTube.  Finally inspired by my learning on FreeCoodeCamp I am now enrolled on a tutor led, full time bootcamp starting this November.  Super exciting!

And now we are at the beginning of my journey.

What will I learn tomorrow?  Where will this take me?  Stick around and find out.