Returning to JavaScript

It feels like it was only last holiday season that I first built my website following a web tutorial on YouTube. Now, 4 years later, the site remained unfinished and unchanged since those days I spent cooped up during the year of COVID.

Like many of my other projects, "I'm really into coding right now" turned into "I'll get to finishing that up later," finding myself distracted by yet another new thing to start. I always intended to come back to it eventually, but that quickly turned into never.

When I reflect on similar projects that have been way sided in my life, I find myself saying, "if only I had just stuck with it continuously over the last 4 years, imagine where I'd be now." Just imagine.

Well despite that statement being true, fortunately for us, everyday is also a day where we can turn that phrase on its head. "Imagine where I'll be if in 4 years if I keep practicing this skill little by little." Rather than being hard on yourself for getting off track, get back on track and start again. Figure out how to make it stick.

I have a few things that I've been learning to make stick, and one of them now, has indeed been JavaScript. I've found that I need to keep expanding my toolkit in order to stay focused on a task. If I just keep doing the same things over and over, I am quickly bored. So, I've been taking tutorials online through Udemy.

Udemy is an interesting site filled with lots of different courses, paid of course, that cover many topics. If you find the right instructor, it can be super engaging to keep logging in and making progress. I'd call it a more polished YouTube experience.

The person who published a free YouTube video about making this website in Gatsby, Andrew Mead, also had a full course on JavaScript. It's been really fun so far and I've learned more about the syntax I used to make this site, rather than just copying out what Andrew showed to type. It was a lot of fun and I got a certificate for completing the course.. I really did, I promise!

I've since finished watching his entire JavaScript Bootcamp and am now officially a JS master... Yeah, not quite. But I can do substantially more with it and I've moved on to gaining a better understanding of React, which is the framework that compiles modern JS into a format that browsers can understand.

React was technology that was created to build Facebook and the modern web experience we are all used to. From my non-developer point of view, it appears to be the most popular form on the web today. I can see why. Once you get used to it, the language is pretty easy to understand, and you'll be building reusable components in no time!

Thanks for reading. Remember, it's not the price, it's the principle!

Eric