Howdy folks. My name is Shawn. I am an aspiring front-end developer, and I am almost entirely self taught. While I am still learning some core fundamentals, I am ready to start working on my own projects, and wanted to start sharing my progress with the larger developer community.
So, how did I get here?
I've been trying to learn to code in some capacity since 2017. It started with the thought that I'm sure is quite common: 'man, I REALLY want to make a video game'. So, I spent the next couple years, off and on, learning C# and Unity game development. I had a lot of fun and made a couple tiny projects I was proud of. But, at the time, I was comfortable at my job, and the job market for game developers isn't exactly robust (not to mention the horror stories coming out of the AAA game studios). So it become just another hobby that I let slip to the backburner. My web development journey began in the fall of 2020. Decreasing job satisfaction and the realties of living through a pandemic left me far more motivated than I was when learning game development. I even thought to myself 'With some background learning C#, it should be a cake walk to learn web dev!'. It's been over 14 months since then, and I'm STILL laughing at how naïve I was. My first hurdle was just how different javascript is from C#. If you are unfamiliar with C#, it is a very explicit language. The variables have to have declared data types, functions have to have a declared return value, and in general is just much more rigid. Honestly, adjusting my thought processes to how JS just isn't the same way took a lot longer than I would have liked. It still sometimes feels a little like magic to pass parameters through a function without declaring the data types and it just...works! My next, and by far the largest, hurdle was CSS. CSS has probably been one of the hardest things I have ever had to learn. The first 5 to 6 months of 2021 was just me despairing about the fact that I just did not understand how to use CSS. I lost track of how many tutorials and courses I went though on CSS, and realizing that I still didn't get it whenever I tried to make a page on my own. I ended up putting my JS studies on hold, just to focus on conquering my CSS white whale. I pretty much spent the rest of 2021 entirely on working on my CSS skills. And now, I'm back in my JS studies, trying to code a little something every day to learn, practice, and have fun while doing it.
Self-learning is hard
For me personally, one of the most challenging aspects of going down the self-taught route has been accountability. It can be hard to keep up progress and maintain a viable pace with only myself to hold me to it. One of the most consistent pieces of advise for self-taught developers that I have come across is the idea of 'learning in public'. Tell people about your work, share you progress, ask for feedback, with the overall goal of generating some kind of accountability. My goal with this blog is to share the things I learn and build as I learn and build them. My hope is that by sharing my trials, errors, pitfalls, and successes, I can grow as a developer, and maybe help others learn and grow along the way.
Before this turns into a novel, I want to share a few of the project ideas that I plan to work on over the next few months:
a website where you can select a movie genre and a year, and it will display a list of movies of that genre that were released in that year. I want to use this to learn about working with APIs and and web-scraping data, as well as managing and manipulating data.
a website where you can play around with certain CSS features. I currently have a version of this that is a visual editor for CSS box-shadows: shawncocklin.github.io/boxshadow-playground. I would like to expand upon this by adding the ability to choose which CSS feature you would like to interact with, like borders and simple animations
finally, I would like to start exploring static site generators, and make my own blog site from scratch
Thanks for tuning in for my origin story! I look forward to sharing my journey with everyone 😊