Two Year Recap
Tags: codenewbie, programming, yearinreview, webdev
Published: 2020-12-27 16:09:33

With 2020 coming to a close; I decided to take a step back on my learning journey and look at how far I've come. It's always pleasing to self-reflect, you can use it as a form of motivation. It has been a difficult year for all of us and I think it is time to look back and celebrate your accomplishments. 

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I find many people describe their path into the tech industry as a "Journey", mainly because it is never-ending. Although you may reach your end goal and get a job (if that is even your goal), you never stop learning. The industry is forever evolving.

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My first interaction with HTML and websites was in 2017 using Adobe Dreamweaver. I started my journey into Web Development in September 2018. I got a recommendation from youtube; It was a video from DarkCode who does fantastic short HTML CSS and JS creations. I found it fascinating how some code could create such beautiful web components. I have done some basic HTML on Dreamweaver before this, but I still didn't know what was happening. It was like magic. Later I decided I want to do this my self and started learning HTML. After going through all the HTML and CSS courses on SoloLearn, I began building simple, not so pretty sites (I spoke about this more in [this blog](https://dev.to/merichard123/the-beginning-of-my-web-dev-journey-2jkh)). 

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Around November 2019, I started the #100DaysOfCode Challenge on Instagram. The aim of this was to get better at CSS and basic-level JavaScript. I completed the challenge in February 2020. From there until about April I really started to learn JavaScript in depth. 

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In April 2020; I began to learn React. I watched a bunch of videos and gave up about 4 times because this whole concept of JSX confused me. Eventually, I found the instructor (CodeEvolution) who helped me understand React and how it works. At around this time, I started the second round of 100DaysOfCode. This time to focus on learning react (I spoke about why I chose to do 100 days of code in [this blog](https://richardcoric.netlify.app/blogs/what-i-learned-from-100-days-of-code-43k0)). This time was full of ups and downs I thought of quitting React when it got hard when I couldn't get anything to work, but I held on and it was worth it. While all this was happening I began to have a look into some backend frameworks. I took a long time to decide which I wanted to learn. I started with Flask and then realised I prefer Django. 

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I was then practising ReactJS, I built my Portfolio at the beginning of July; at this point, the UK was well into Quarantine. With nothing better to do, I spent the rest of July polishing my React JS skills. 

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End of July beginning of August, I began to delve into the backend. I built my first Rest API using Flask on the 29th of July. I began to learn Fullstack Django on the 31st of July. I felt pretty confident with Django after finishing a Dating App for Developers project at the end of August. 

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As schools opened up in September I had less and less time to code, however, I made sure I get at least an hour in each week. Later in September, I finished a collaborative project with someone I met on "Dev.to"!

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I took part in Hacktoberfest in October and learned so much about contributing to open source. Then we get to the present; I started to learn about Django Rest APIs in December of this year and hope to continue into the next.

To put things into perspective back when I started to learn the back-end it made no sense to me how a back-end and a frontend connect together; now I'm the one writing APIs.
It's crazy to think I was writing HTML and CSS just over a year ago and now I brand myself as Fullstack.

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### The Future
I have many long term goals. Eventually I would like to try VueJS and Express. But going into 2021 I will be building more APIs using django and getting better at integrating them on the frontend. 

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Thank you for taking the time and allowing me to share my past 2 years with you. If there is anything I would like you to take from this; it would be that you can achieve your goals, never give up and if you are dragged down by anything; always get back up and pull back with greater force. You've got this <3


Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels