The Starting Line

Beginning with ‘The End in Mind’

Starting this past Thursday and continuing through the weekend I began my plunge head first into FreeCodeCamp. To me, this marks the official beginning of my developer journey. At this point in my life I’m an audio engineer and classical musician that has always had a heavy gravitational pull towards coding. I’d be the audio engineer at the studio that got pumped to learn scripting within our audio editing software to extend its functionality, so this is a very exciting moment to finally go all-in.

My initial experience of FCC (Free Code Camp) had me feeling like Jodie Foster traveling at warp speed through wormholes in ‘Contact’. In the first few sections, each exercise is broken down to one single concept and when you correctly complete the exercise you’re rewarded with congratulatory remarks such as:

“By the Power of Greyskull”

“Thundercats, Talley Ho!”

As a 39 year old who grew up with He-Man and the Thundercats, my inner soul has found comfort and contentment with FCC. :) I’ve done a fair amount of book and video study on HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript, so these beginning sections felt like a review - with the exception of learning the basics of Bootstrap, and jQuery. FCC’s Bootstrap introduction was especially fun because they had you building a good looking layout, even with animations, in no time.

After finishing up the jQuery section, I began my first two projects which consist of Tribute page and a Personal Portfolio Page. You can use these Codepen links to check my work. I made sure to start my code from scratch, go with whatever style I was feeling in the moment, and search for solutions to my problems as I got stuck. I used a lot of Bootstrap in these projects since that was something new to me and I wanted to make best use of these exercises to help solidify that knowledge. If you’re actually taking time out of your day to read this blog, any feedback you have - good, bad, or ugly - will all be happily received by me!