Learning

(I started this post after one week but let it sit for a week . . .so now I am up to lecture 57, 18 % complete, booyah! )

So I have indeed learned some new things my first week in Colt Steele’s Web Developer Bootcamp Udemy course (first 4 units), as I thought I might.

First of all, I have learned some cool Sublime shortcuts. In my first Udemy coding course, the teacher was typing so fast and things would sometimes just appear on the screen, but he never told us how he did it. Now I know and can be at least half as fast and do not have to pause and rewind so often.

I also learned about multiple cursors. No more cut-and-paste ad nauseum. It’s the little things!  Oh and command-slash to comment out the easy way.  And command-shift-D to copy what you just typed infinitum. Also the lorem-tab shortcut. Splendid.

I have been hopping back and forth between Sublime, Atom, Brackets, Visual Studio Code, but for the time being I am kinda locked in to Sublime because that is what he is using and I am really liking the time-saving shortcuts. Now all I have to do is make sure my packages and user settings are synchronized between my two computers. Going to a Sublime installation that does not have my settings is a sobering experience. Gotta do everything by hand again. Bleh!

The other new thing I learned is forms. I won’t say I haven’t been taught forms before. I did learn about forms last year in a Coursera course, but I didn’t get it. I tried so hard on the assignment to recreate what they wanted and it was never right. This time I got it and was able to recreate everything. There were a couple things I missed, like my placeholder text was slightly off, but I got the concept; I just didn’t read the placeholder closely enough.

I understand tables better too.

In a CSS uint I have learned the word ‘octathorp‘. I bet you have no clue what that means. (I sure didn’t.) Look it up.

He makes heavy use of the Mozilla Developer Network pages (MDN) and encourages us to do the same. I had glanced at them once or twice before but I had no idea the depth to which they go and how useful they can be.

I’ve been peeping the gitter rooms for the course and it is indeed amazing how many new people start this course everyday. I intend to be one of the many who finish it as well. (A lot of helpful people in the gitter rooms as well which is great. Just as good as the FreeCodeCamp and Odin gitters.)

On a side note, I found my next challenge for after #100DaysOfCode. I mean I could just do #301DaysOfCode or a redux of #100DaysOfCode but as I intend to be looking for a job as a scrum master at that time I won’t do that. I think I’m going to start the 100 Day Deep Work Challenge to really focus on building something or learning something (like Kanban mastery or a deep dive into Agile and/or Scrum).  I will save that for another post, but to read more about it you can check out James Willet’s blog.