A couple of months after quitting my coding endeavors, the idea of giving up really started to bother me. I felt like a mentally weak loser and it felt like a direct contrast to the character that I had spent years developing. Determined to overcome this horrendous feeling, I started to systematically approach programming in a different way. As the saying goes. “Insanity is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.” The biggest problem that I had as I was using online resources to learn was that I was seeing the trees but not the forest. I was able to understand a variable, for loop, if – else conditions but unable to piece them all together to write working code. After searching google, I found a reddit post that recommended a site called teamtreehouse. It had a 10 day free trial and I was determined to learn how to code.
As strange as it sounds, my real understanding of programming began with HTML and CSS. On the teamtreehouse site, I spent the first week dabbling with HTML and CSS and understanding what purpose they served on a web application. I became acquainted with all the different HTML elements like <div>, <body>, <p>, <span>, etc. And the different ways to add color and style to the elements via CSS. It was finally in the 2nd week where I learned about Javascript. All the manual DOM insertion and styling that I had done with HTML & CSS, it can be done programmatically with JavaScript. As I took small steps in using Javascript to style HTML elements or insert them as a child of a parent element. It became clear to me when and why programming is used.
Through the use of Javascript programming for DOM manipulation, coding finally made sense to me. Coding was feeding the computer instructions to accomplish a task. This realization was a monumental moment for me and helped me greatly in my programming and academic journey.
