Thursday, December 10, 2015

Day 1.5: Getting over procrastination

Day 1: ?

To be quite honest day one started on November 10th. Well it was more of a "pre-day 1". It was then I discovered Jessica Dewalt and had the brilliant idea to follow in her foot steps.

But around January 2015 was when I decided that it was time to get serious about learning to code but never did anything. Until November 10th. Nothing in life comes easy especially if you just sit on your fat lazy bottom and don't take action. (#noteToSelf)

There is so much free information on the web to help beginners with coding. Honestly though it was quite overwhelming. And I don't have any "coding tech savy" friends to call up for help.

I binged on YouTube videos and advice blogs until I pulled my hair out. Then I decided baby steps and hand hold isn't bad. So Codecademy was the beginning.

The goal was to give myself one month to get into a routine and then actually start hardcode learning and building on December 1, 2015. 
But are your interests and why do you want to learn to code? Yes I knew you would ask this!

I've always been interested in technology and computers. But I've never had the self confidence to go out and learn computer science more in depth. I was never in the target audience for these classes growing up from elementary to undergraduate. I love the idea of being about to create website, mobile apps and databases. With a background in science and research I believe now coding would be such a beneficial skill set to have under your belt. And it would enable on to be location independent when it come to work. And I also want to inspire other brown girls to try something new and step away from fear. It is such a beautiful thing now to see the STEM education movement in full effect for the pre-teens.
But I'm 31 now and if I can inspire other young adult women to give this a go then so be it!
"Whats on the other side of fear? Nothing!"-Jamie Foxx

The "Make a Website" lesson on Codecademy is great. It walks you through all the details and provides great explanation. I started on November 10th and then got distracted by other free materials. I revisited it yesterday after an entire month. Shameful! The course says it take 3 hours but I for about 8 hours before getting completely stuck on lesson 5 of 14 on the last unit.



My Codecademy progress on December 10 before restarting the class.

Today the goal is to finish this bad boy and pat myself on the back! I'll check back in when I am finito.-BGC