My First 50 Days of Learning to Code

Hello World! I am a 30-Year-Old civil/construction engineer, learning to code for the first time. I share my journey and learning here.

Table of Contents

• The Rush
• The Feedback
• The Balance
• The Night full of Panic
• Hosting on Github
• Slow Progress Pressure
• Learnings and Challenges
• Work, Family & Coding

The Rush

The response to my last post left me overwhelmed. It was shared by Code Newbie & three other twitter handles of Dev.to family. But like every other content on the internet, the party ends quite soon, but I got some appreciation and some excellent feedback until that time.

The Feedback

Out of the feedback I received everywhere, I particularly liked Waylon Walker's feedback. He gave me a few recommendations about making my post more presentable & then he advised me against taking a screenshot showing the picture and username of someone in negativity. And I liked this quote, "Praise in public and punish in private."

His feedback made me realize my mistake and at the same time made me very happy about how people respect each other here, it is not very common in my current industry i.e., Construction

The Balance

While your article, when shared by popular twitter handles, can get you some excellent feedback, there is another side of it as well. When popular twitter handle shares your article, your article's visibility increases exponentially, and you get so many notifications almost every hour, if not more frequently. This can lead to you spending more time on twitter/dev.to than on coding.

It is crucial to strike a balance. Jai, my mentor, noticed this very soon and asked me to be conscious about it. I admitted that I was guilty of spending more time on twitter/dev.to than on coding and would work to strike a balance.

Hosting my web page on Github

In the next few days, I was doing random things to host my website on Github, that's when Jai came to my rescue & gave me a list

• Install VS Code
• Make yourself comfortable with VS Code
• Make a small HTML page with No CSS and run it locally
• Install Git & make yourself comfortable with Git
• Create a Github account & create a repository
• Make some commits on Git & push it on Github
• Get a domain name
• Host it on Github

The Night full of Panic

I thought of buying a new laptop as my personal laptop wasn't in good shape. I didn't know if I could transfer the data later on from my office laptop (I was coding after my office hours on my office laptop since the beginning). I asked Jai's for advice. He suggested that it would be too soon to buy a laptop. The decision to get a laptop is significant, and I should consider gifting myself a laptop after reaching a milestone. He also told me that the code and other data could easily be migrated from one laptop to another.

I took his advice and started working according to the list. One evening, I tried to link my local git software to the Github account by generating ssh keys using ssh-keygen. Right then, I got a message saying, "Executable blocked, you are seeing this notice because you attempted to run a restricted, unsupported, or illegal program in violation of the company's security policy and the activity was logged."

When I saw this, I couldn't breathe normally, my vision disfigured, and my hands shook. I thought I had done something illegal, and I might lose my job.

It was past midnight, but I couldn't help but call Jai. He told me to calm down and said to me that I didn't do anything illegal. The executable block was to avoid running keygen software, which are used to crack software. There was no need to panic.

It took me some time to come to my senses, soon after that, I took out my old laptop, transferred the data, and decided that going forward I would work on my personal laptop only. I successfully managed to host my portfolio website on Github.

I have only put some basic HTML code there right now. I am working on to make it look more presentable using CSS.

Slow Progress Pressure

Javascript has been difficult for me from the very beginning. There were days when I couldn't even finish a single coding challenge (on freeCodeCamp) in an hour, and since then, the pressure of slow progress started mounting on. So I focused on completing the challenge somehow rather than understanding the concept.

But soon I realized that it was not going to work this way. I started to think less about the progress and more about the understanding of concepts. I started watching detailed tutorials to get a better understanding of concepts. It helped a lot.

Learnings and Challenges

In the last couple of weeks, I learned about the VS Code, Git, Github, to make my website running. In Javascript, I learned about objects, loops, recursion, and arrow functions.

I had a tough time with Git once when I forgot to write the commit message & a new window opened, asking me to enter the commit message, but nothing seemed to work.

After watching quite a few videos on Youtube, I came to know it was vim. And to enter my commit title, I was supposed to hit 'i' to enter insert mode, type a message, and hit esc when done. Then finally type :wq to write and quit.

Similarly, loops, recursion, and arrow functions also gave me a hard time. I took help from Jai and watched multiple Youtube videos to get a better understanding of the concepts. It is still an ongoing process.

Work, Family & Coding

The last couple of weeks have been troublesome for me. Both of my parents and I fell ill at the same time. My father had to be hospitalized for surgery. My mother was also having multiple issues.

In the last two weeks alone, I have visited the doctor/hospital more than a dozen times for myself & along with my parents. Not only these frequent visits to the hospital were exhausting both physically and mentally, but my work at the office was also starting to pile on, and I had to work till late in the night.

Though I had many reasons not to code, I realized I could still take out an hour for coding. I somehow managed to continue my coding streak. While there was too much on my plate, I am still guilty of wasting time. This is something I have to work on.

To summarize it all, my first fifty days of coding have been immensely rewarding and eventful, and I am looking forward to the future.

Join the discussion

I would love to get some feedback here.

• How was your experience of the first fifty days of coding?
• How do you balance your time?
• How do you manage your time effectively?