Last weekend, I decided to call one of my friends over to my place so that we could have a chat about programming. He is a capable programmer who has experience with designing full stack websites but has never worked with games before. Since I am learning to code, I decided to ask him for some advice on how best to proceed now that I am learning as well.
As you know I talked about how I was learning Javascript both on Codecademy and the Sololearn app that I have on my phone, I have finished the courses there and even received a certificate of completion. But to be honest I am still lacking, I have a good grasp of the fundamentals but no practical experience and I needed some more advice.
I don't want to just jump into any project done by someone else and try changing things here and there because even though I will learn from it...I doubt that it will be as rewarding as trying to solve problems given to me and then seeing if they were right or not.
He came over with his wife and kid, we both decided to sit outside so that we won't be disturbed and talk about different things. We chitchatted about random topics in the beginning before actually talking about coding. I told him how I had progressed in learning to code and even though he was happy with it, he recommended that I try to do some more exercises to get a better understanding of the languages as well as enhance my problem-solving skills.
Before they left, he asked me to practice some code exercises on codewars.com. Before speaking with him I had heard about Codewars but never really bothered to check it out.
Since he recommended it, I decided to check it out and even signed up for the website right that very night. To be honest, I didn't really like the design of the website very much, it was a bit annoying in my eyes but I wanted to practice so I continued on. Another thing I noticed was that even though they have different ranks of difficulties for the exercises, it was still hard to find the right exercises for a beginner. Nonetheless, I persevered, I looked up some fundamental exercises and began working on them. I don't know how many I solved that night but I was starting to feel happy because most of them didn't pose much of a challenge for me.
This happiness would be shortlived though...I came across a problem that I didn't have an idea of how to go about solving. It was related to creating a function that would find out the factorial of any given number. Now I know what factorials are but how would I go about doing that...quite a challenging exercise as I have never done something similar before. So I decided to take a break and think about it for a good while before attempting to solve it. The next day, I came up with a few solutions and decided to test them out before going back to codewars.com and submitting my code.
I was feeling happy once more but none of the solutions I had devised for the problem worked. At that moment I felt dejected but I soon recovered from it and decided to look up the answer on the internet. After all, I had tried...I didn't just blindly go about looking for the answer on the internet even though I had failed. Failure will come in almost everything but if I let that failure take hold of me then I wouldn't be able to move forward. To my surprise, the answer was a very simple one for the exercise but it was also something I had never really seen before.
Apparently, they utilized an approach called recursive. I had never been taught about it on any of the platforms that I was learning on and that made me wonder though. Was it truly a good approach to learn everything from those sites. It's a good thing I didn't jump straight into designing a project, become unable to solve it and then completely give up on programming. I think I will continue to challenge myself on codewars.com for a while.
Learn and master the different things that I can learn from there even if there are some exercises I won't be able to solve. Eventually, I will be able to expand my skills and once I am ready, I will work on the first project that I have set for myself; Browserquest.
Much love to all of you for reading. Please do let me know if there are any other resources that I could check out to help improve my knowledge. I want to make myself better before attempting a big project. Thank you very much. <3
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