Documenting My Coding Journey

I’ve been researching the bigger picture lately while still working my way through Codecademy a bit. By researching the big picture, I hope to be able to aim my shot and get more bang for my effort. If I just launch right into it and put all of my energy into one thing, it might not be as efficient. If I dabble in learning to code while also looking at the big picture of the industry and where I want to end up eventually, I’ll have a more clear goal in mind and make that happen.

I’m tempted to treat this like a writing project and belabor the prose of it all, but that’s not the point. The point is to document my journey with computer science. I’ve heard that you can teach yourself to code by standing on the shoulders of the beautiful people who have put information out there for free online. Let’s see if that’s true. 

My background - I currently work in education. I know my way around technology about as well as anyone born in the late 80s, but I don’t have a lot of experience with the computer science side of things. I can write a little bit of basic html, and I remember writing a simple python program in high school. I think it was a simple text based adventure, but I really don’t remember. I don’t have a great memory for things that happened way back, and I guess that junior year project didn’t make the cut. Long story short, I’m a novice. I’m a beginner. I want to see how far a beginner can go.

I’m going to start with html because I’m definitely interested in the practical front-end web development side of things. When I reach a certain level of familiarity with html, I plan to branch out to other programming languages. 

Today I’ll work on Codecademy a little bit. I’ve been dabbling in their html course, and I want to wrap that up before I move on. 

One note - the course has been helpful, but where I make great knowledge gains is when I find a thread to start pulling. I like to ask an interesting question based on what I’m learning and travel down that wormhole of research for a while. It’s been fun and informative to just look around the internet a bit.