My Coding Journey (part 2)
November 2020 - December 2020
In the November of 2020, I once again got interested in coding because of codepen. It encouraged me to code again because it’s like social media app, but for programmers. When you code HTML, CSS, and Javascript in the browser, and other developers can see the code you created and its output.
I used it for 2 months, and created some navbar, carousel, accordion, etc. But I slowly lost interest in coding, and I realized that coding is a complete waste of time. I feel like I wasn’t really benefitting from doing it, so there was a time that I completely stopped coding.
But before quitting, I saw different frameworks like react, angular, and vue, being used to create user interfaces. I was interested in learning one but it will be hard and tedious since it has a steeper learning curve than vanilla JavaScript, which I don’t like.
January 2021 - September 2021
On 24th of January 2021, I took the opportunity to learn git. Before, I can’t grasp the importance of Git. And so, by the time I tried it, I realized that it’s just a tool to help you keep track of changes in a project. Now, if you’re just making a small vanilla project without using heavy tooling, or you’re only working on a side project, it’s fine.
But if you’re going to clone your project to another computer, this may get complicated and expensive. For example, if you attempt to use Google Drive in creating a Node Project, you may encounter storage problems because the node_modules folder consumes too much space. That’s why Github and Gitlab exist! They only sync up the files that are responsible for creating temporary directors (like node_modules)
After learning some git’s features, I then tried making the-whole-page, which contains a lot of hard-coded html to create a documentation site because I want to learn other fields in programming such as:
- backend
- desktop/mobile development
- cli application, etc.
Halfway in making the-whole-page, I felt that writing too much hard-coded html is really slow and so, I lost motivation in completing it. I tried learning something new. I tried using node because it might help me. I thought it was easy. But the more I use node, it became clear to me that there were a lot more things to think about. node_modules, package.json, package-lock.json, etc. caused me headaches. It eventually led me to quit node.js
It was August, and school started. I tried to be bold and started learning c++. And at first, I realized that the difference in c++ and javascript is that c++ is a statically typed language. But at that time, I didn’t really understand why statically-typed language is very important.
But after just printing characters in the console, I quit the language. The reason why is that c++ is hard and there is too much mental overhead like memory management because it has low-level control over it. Plus, since it has weird syntaxes and a lot of boilerplate going on.
September 2021 - November 2021
After quitting to learn c++, I continued doing the-whole-page up until November. The reason why I want to make the-whole-page is that I can browse the website and have a refresher. But up until this point, I haven’t really finished the-whole-page because it is hard coded. It’s hard to understand what was going on and I haven’t realized that because I didn’t know what markdown is.
If you don’t know what markdown is, It’s actually just a file or string that gets converted to html after being compiled. You can also embed html directly in markdown (although it won’t have code completions)
Summary
- I lost my interest in web development because hard coding HTML and CSS is hard.
- I learned node.js but it was too hard for me.
- I learned a bit of c++ but quit it afterwards due to it’s difficulty.
- In the course of the year, I spent most of my time doing school works.