Day 01 | The Decision

That's not really me - not yet, anyway.

Okay. So it sounds like it was an easy call to learn to code. Well, it wasn't. Why? Because I have a job - a good one at that. I'm an educator who teaches kids how to read and write. Side note: You're going to see a lot of mistakes - both grammatical and structural - in these posts but that's only because I have to write quickly. See above: I'm learning to code. I have limited hours so I don't have time to go back and spell check nor grammar check.

Then, why learn coding?

There's plenty of reasons for coding - least of which is that it seems like the new lingua franca of the new world and the next generation. I feel like software is eating the world - and jobs! I have to be somewhat prepared for the next wave of the future.

Why now?

Because there's not time like now to learn. There are numerous resources, some of which are free and some of which cost actual money. I like the former but for education - and it may be my old school mentality - but actually putting up money to learn something is a sign to the vendor and more importantly, myself that I'm serious about doing it.

So where did I look when beginning this journey?

Honestly, I asked people first. I asked friends who were either in technology related industries and more importantly, people who knew me. I like to this story about how an old friend of mine who used to attend the "H" college in Boston once wrote me out of the blue. He said, "Hey Dave, why don't you look into this vlogging thing. I think you'll be good at it." That was like his only email to me - like ever. I thought that it wasn't for me because in my mind I was an "auteur" in the vein of Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, and Spike Lee. A couple of years later, vlogging took off - and of course, without me. Sometimes the people around you whether they are good friends or not, know and see you the way you can't see yourself. Sometimes they are right in their assessment of the gifts and qualities you have and how it can fit in a certain role.

Did someone say you'd be good at coding?

Not exactly. I'm not even sure I'd be good at it. But most of the people I know and respect said that I should learn it. So here I am blogging about it. WHY? Because I love sharing with others ways that may improve their prospects of a better life with regards to more opportunities.

You can probably research all the different sites like coursera, udacity, freecodecamp, bloc, viking school, treehouse and many many more.

Long story short, I chose teamtreehouse.com over udacity because quite simply, I liked their videos from a learning perspective. I know the teachers over at udacity are legit, ie super qualified but for me the uniformity and consistency of the video lectures made me feel at ease in going into such a foreign field. Know what I mean? My software engineer friend tried to get me to go to udacity and just use their nanotech degree syllabus and look for the individual lectures for free but I kept on going back to Treehouse for some reason.

I'm not even sure if the treehouse.com tech degree means anything to anyone, but for me, the 7 day free trial was enough to get me to sign up. And when I did sign up, they offered the first month at half the original cost. So basically, they were offering their $199/mo. price for about $99.50.

Did I stop there? No. I then somehow stumbled across freecodecamp.com which I never even heard of before starting this journey. I was perusing the usual authority sites like quora.com and reddit.com for honest reviews of online coding programs and freecodecamp.com kept on getting mentioned for: a) being free and b)application based

So now, this is my setup so far.

I'm taking teamtreehouse's "tech degree program" for full stack development java script for $199/mo. And I'm using freecodecamp.com to get in extra work as I'm learning on teamtreehouse.

For instance, I started with HTML on teamtreehouse. The videos were helpful understanding the basic principles of HTML and CSS but I really needed to practice - even though there are application exercises on teamtreehouse. I found that I needed more exercises. That's the reason I'm on freecodecamp.com as well. I'm glad I'm on it because not only did they get me to find a local FB group of aspiring software engineers but they also helped me sign up for a github.com account as well. More on that later.

This blog post is getting long so I'll continue Day 01 on the next post.