Teaching Myself Web Development

This is the first time I’ve blogged in quite some time, but I want to keep a record of my learning outcomes as I teach myself web development over the next couple of years and to help reinforce concepts by creating a kind of permanent mind map.

My history with Web Development

My familiarity with HTML and CSS actually comes from my experience with blogging and setting up static webpages back in the late 90’s. Blogger was one of the platforms I used quite a bit and I was able to change the layout and templating of my site by messing under the hood with the underlying HTML just by looking at it and seeing what it was that it was doing and changing things and observing what happened… Sometimes I broke the page and sometimes it worked. When I really wanted to change how the site looked I looked at the CSS but for some reason that looked entirely foreign to me and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of resources online to learn from as there seems to be today so I just pretty much left CSS along. Javascript I never even got around to. So in this way, I learned HTML just in order to help facilitate what I wanted to do with my own blog. I can remember that the HTML and CSS was all together in the same file too, CSS at the top and HTML at the bottom.

Back in the early 2000’s I took some correspondence coursework that included learning C++. It didn’t go too well trying to teach myself a full fledged language and I got frustrated and quit.

A couple years ago I decided I wanted to teach myself Web Development and messed around with Udacity, Codecademy, Free Code Camp, and The Odin Project, however I got frustrated with Javascript after a couple months and gave up again, but not before I taught myself how to install and use Ubuntu Linux, Git and Github.

Around that time I started going to the gym and getting into physical fitness and health after turning 41 and being 50 lbs over weight and realizing something needed to change with my life. By all rights and in accordance with everything else in my life, this should have only lasted a couple months before I got bored and quit yet another personal project, however 3 years later and I’m still going strong and what I’ve learned in that time is that I can I use that same dedication and discipline that I use for the gym in other areas of my life, all areas of my life.

So I’m back now to teaching myself web developement along with going back to school at the local community college majoring in programming. What I want to do is to finish my degree in the next two years and also use that time to teach myself all the ins and outs of full stack web development and computer science. I’ve come across a whole lot of amazing resources online and in my next blog post I will talk about some of these and what my plan is going forward.