Beginning of the Actual 100 Days of Coding | R100 Series

Here I’ll be reflecting on the actual start of the actual “Hundred Days of Coding.” I like certain things about Napoleon, so I chose a name for it based on a period from his life.

It sounds Napoleonic (which is the point), but in literal meaning, I'm just counting off 100 days.

Number 1 thing I learned today: LOOK IT UP ON YOUR OWN. GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND. Look through the documentation, look for other people who have had the same problem on Stack Overflow, whatever.

It's really important to get past the instinct to run to the teacher every time your pencil breaks. SHARPEN YOUR OWN PENCIL.

Bonus lesson: YouTube is also your friend. Somebody shows you what you're reading about.

I gave myself an arbitrary count to propel content creation on LinkedIn and the 100-day count gives me a sort of … well, it gives me an external thing to respond to. “I’m going to be doing this for a while, so I’ve got to figure out what it takes to keep making progress!”

And so I practice my Google Fu, looking things up. One of the problems is when I get a crazy idea for a project at the beginning of a learning curve and I discover there is a LOT more to learn.

I review one of the good things about books: easy to fast forward and rewind.

In the books, I blew through over 50 pages in approaching where it's really new content. Firmed up some definitions. Tomorrow a bit more of that.

I’d been going through Angela Yu’s complete web development boot camp on Udemy. For the moment (October 2022) I’ve gotten stuck. I think I’m coming up on some HTML and CSS lessons, so I might be able to skip (or skim) those.

I'm continuing with Angela Yu's complete web development course on Udemy. Right now I'm wrestling through Bootstrap. I can't figure out how to get this one menu to drop down when clicked.

Bootstrap is a beautiful thing: instead of coding all the dimensions of a thing myself, Bootstrap lets you dip into a whole library of code that other people compiled.

But still there are the basic things about where you put a thing.

Here I begin to find where the course falls short. Angela Yu throws you into a problem and says to find the answer in the documentation. While I appreciate being told what to do to find the answer for myself, I’m still so basic in some respects that I need the hand holding.

Also the fact that you have to look beyond what your video course on Udemy is telling you.

The Angela Yu full stack web developer course is WONDERFUL. But where it falls short, the process of working though what I've done helps me find where the course might fall short.

So yeah, GIYF, YIYF. Google is your friend. YouTube is your friend.

In future posts we’ll see where I lose it and can’t keep up with the full stack course. But a beginning is quite a good start.