When I wrote about learning Web Development again, I described my strategy to ideally become a Full-Stack Web Developer by August 2023. Nonetheless, getting a chance to work as a Front-End or Back-End engineer at first is something I’d be happy with, as a stepping stone.

I managed to complete all my goals for January 2023, and I’d like to share in this post more details about my strategy for February.

Monthly Goals

As a reminder, here are my goals for this month:

  1. ☑️ Finish CSS Foundations section on The Odin Project: I’d be able to design pages and content, ideally make my resume look good online.
  2. Finish the Tribute Page project on FreeCodeCamp: I’ll have another project to show on my GitHub, with a larger tech stack hopefully.
  3. Complete the CSS sections on Colt Steele’s Udemy bootcamp: A second resource to cement my CSS knowledge, as well as learning about Flexbox and Bootstrap.

Monthly goals are great, but I believe weekly goals are better to make sure I stay on track and regularly review my progress. I can then see if I’m behind or not.

Weekly Goals

These are goals I write in my notebook, and I even have daily goals, or simply daily tasks. I put a lot of emphasis on Colt Steele’s course on my notebook. However, I’ll add other resources here because I have more space. Here they are for the February:

  • Week 2 (01.30 to 02.05): Finish sections 5 & 6 of Colt Steele’s Udemy bootcamp.
  • Week 3 (02.06 to 02.12): Finish sections 7 & 8 of Colt Steele’s Udemy bootcamp + finish Survey Form project from FreeCodeCamp.
  • Week 4 (02.13 to 02.19): Finish sections 9 & 10 of Colt Steele’s Udemy bootcamp + get to Flexbox project from FreeCodeCamp.
  • Week 5 (02.20 to 02.26): Finish sections 11 & 12 of Colt Steele’s Udemy bootcamp + start section 13.

Although in the previous post, I wrote about my weekly progress since I started, I want to make it a regular occurence. I can reflect on what I did, as well as prove to myself I’m progressing. Frequently, I may be so deep in my learning that I’d forget stepping back and get an overview of what I accomplished until now.

Since I described the first two weeks of my learning before, and we’re midway through the 3rd week of February which is actually my fourth week of learning, I’ll share what I did during week 3.

Week 3 (02.06 to 02.12)

This week was a bit hectic as I spent a lot of time away from my computer doing more creative work. I still managed to complete some sections as I planned.

I gave myself several days to complete the Survey Form project on FreeCodeCamp, but I surprised myself by completing it in less than an hour. You can check my project here. It’s not functional so submitting will result in a 405 error. I need to make a page so it looks better. The goal was to use HTML and CSS to make an elegant page. And I believe I managed quite well, I really copied FreeCodeCamp’s aesthetics though.

And while I postponed many daily tasks, by catching up, I managed to complete section 7 on time, but it took 2 more days to finish section 8. Again, not trying to overwhelm myself, I decided to not put too much on my daily plate.

I haven’t done much Django this week, but I’m getting close to more complex CSS topics on all three resources so that’s pretty good.

Finding Git a little easier

Most of the resources but TOP encourage the use of Git and GitHub for project management and version control. That’s one reason I really enjoy learning through TOP.

In the past, I tried using Git locally and GitHub. Reading about it makes me feel like knowing how to use it is essential as a developer. So every “substantial” project I complete, on whichever platform, I upload it to my GitHub through the terminal.

I’m getting the hang of it, but I know it’s much more complex than what I’m currently doing. Since I’m the sole developer right now, I’m not dealing with pull requests, branch management, etc. So I’m still at the basics, but that seems like enough for now.

Right now, git pull, git log, git diff, git status, git commit, git push, git add, git restore are commands I’m familiar with. Also, using gh repo clone or gh repo create is something I’m slowly getting used to. When creating a remote repository, I still have to look at the repository creation page on GitHub. It’s only a matter of time until it becomes second nature.

HTML and CSS are quite fun but I want to get to JavaScript

I’m already familiar with HTML and CSS, so I do find some of the classes boring. In particular, since I’m pacing myself, I do find my progress slow, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

I’m eager to get to the JavaScript sections and doing more interactive stuff. This is one reason I started looking at Django. Not only it’s a widely used framework, there’s some programming involved. I can’t wait until I get to Front-End frameworks like React or Vue, I’ve seen these names way too often.

I think I’ve made quite good progress this week despite postponing many of the tasks. I can keep going. If my story has inspired you so far, please leave a comment below. See you in the next post.