insights from the #devretro2022 blog by Vikas Rai and a big thanks to him!!!

Introduction

Hello, my name Is Luqman Obalola studying BSc. information technology, university of Ilorin.

In this article, I’m sharing my journey as a web developer and my experiences.

So it all started back in the 2020 during the lockdown due to the outbreak corona virus. I just got admitted to the university, after my exams and we went on holiday break hoping to resume soon, then comes the outbreak of the virus which led to the shutting down of movements and other social activities within the country. As days went by during the lock-down and there is limited activities to do -- increased my interest in surfing the internet and wondering on what I can get involved in probably to make some money out of it too. Although I experienced it for the first time during my freshman year, I was not into it as it was hard to understand then. Later on, I decided to go about it again and I took it from the easiest one (html) although it wasn’t considered as a programming language but I ended up learning a lot that I had not thought of.

My journey as web developer since 2020

I had deep interesting in coding stuffs since my primary school days but with no computer and limited time made it impossible for me to learn it.

I stated web development in 2020 and I had no prior knowledge of it before. I followed YouTube videos, udemy courses and official documentation of programming languages. By 2021 I learned so many things about web development and programming.

My favorite YouTube channel for learning was the netninja, and other channels I discovered later.

After learning the basics, I lacked confidence in taking projects and dive into full-stack development hoping to put me in a better shape.

I decided learning from a programmer in person and not only on YouTube so I went to an IT center (femtech) and learnt PHP language taught by Mr. jamiu. Nevertheless, I learned through the nentninja courses for more understanding of the language.

That was a perfect course for me and after completing I was pretty good with programming and had the basic understanding of back-end development.

Soon after the course, Existence of frameworks and UI libraries like vue, react, angular and Gatsby become popular and I was like, I will have to learn about these also so I started learning react through YouTube videos.

All in all, By the end of 2021, I learnt much about front-end but lacked confidence as all the projects I have built so far was through YouTube videos or udemy courses.

Challenges I faced when learning

The first problem I encountered was that whenever I built a project I wasn’t confident I can do it on my own.

Secondly, wherever I wanted to implement some functionalities or widgets like search bar and others, I go to the internet to look for answers about it even though I learnt about them from the YouTube tutorials, I felt like I know nothing.

Thirdly, I lacked self confidence in programming tackling problems and after some months of learning about a solution to a problem I forgot about it.

After all this, I realized I am trapped in a tutorial hell!! And that I was busy learning and not developing projects.

How I overcome my challenges

So there was two problem I realized I was facing;

I have to write clean codes without any help from YouTube channels or the internet

Boosting my self-confidence by working more on projects and practicing code challenges

After all, I thought of learning again form the scratch but without YouTube videos or udemy courses, instead with web documentation.

Then to practice my learning, I started building projects from frontendmentor.io challenges and also writing blog about how I built the project.

This approach boosts my front-end skills and became more confident in myself. After 3 to four months I tried applying my skills in building real life projects so I can learn new thing as well.

Lessons I learned in 2020

I learned many during my web-dev journey especially in the year 2022.

First is that, you should have self confidence in anything you want to do and be brave to tackle on problems on your own.

To learn new technology, instead of watching videos and learning through that, create projects with it and you learn through that as you increase in making the project more complex.

Try to read through official documentation about certain languages to gain accurate knowledge about it.

Do not stop making projects if you have mastered a certain technology start learning about another one.

Write blogs and articles about your daily learning so as to benefit others to learn from you.

Conclusion

My journey as a web developer was adventurous and amazing. I built and I learnt so many things.

The only thing I would advise myself and other developers is to have self-confidence and build projects to master what you have learnt.

So yeah! That all about my journey as a developer and I really hope you enjoy reading it so please help share, like and comment about your accomplishment as a web developer.

Thank you and see you in my next blog post.