So I recently started a coding challenge associated with Women Who Code where women who are along various paths on their technologist career journey have made a commitment to spend at least 30 Days of consistently working on improving their coding and programming skills.
They offered some challenges that we could work on just in case we weren’t sure where to begin. For example, since I joined the Front-End subgroup, we were given the option to complete Wes Bos’s 30 Days of JavaScript course/challenge. In that challenge, Wes Bos makes a video tutorial for each small JavaScript-based project to help developers get more comfortable with different use cases for JavaScript. While I initially chose to follow along, I decided that I already had enough things that I was working on to review and build on my development skills, as well as a fulltime job. So I decided to write a blog post about some of the programs I am utilizing to solidify and further develop my skills.
I’m currently a web developer, and while I do work with both frontend and backend technologies, I tend to work more in the frontend realm, since I also design. Designing and coding the design you made takes a lot of time, and since much of the work I am drawn to or asked to do is design and frontend-development related, whatever backend skills I developed have kind of atrophied. They’re still there, but not as strong. In an attempt to revisit and strengthen my backend skills, I decided that I will find fullstack engineering or development courses or certifications to enroll in. I’m currently taking the Full-Stack Engineer path on Codecademy and IBM’s Full Stack Software Developer certification program on Coursera.
I’m starting from the beginning for both certifications. I revisited HTML on Codecademy and learned some best practices that I wasn’t aware of almost 10 years ago, when I first attempted to learn HTML on Codecademy. A friend who I was working with at a nonprofit program called City Year told me about Codecademy, and I have utilized their courses here and there ever since. For example, I learned about the <tfoot> tag in tables, which I’ve honestly never seen used, nor have I even heard about it until now. I will be sure to implement it in future tables if needed, because it is a great way to section off summarized data at the bottom of a table. The scope attribute in the <th> tag of a table <th scope=”row”> also improves readability of the table if you want to clearly indicate that a specific heading is a row.
For IBM’s certification, I’m starting with a course called Introduction to Cloud Computing. I’ve learned so much so far. The other day, I heard some colleagues in a volunteer group mention containerization and I actually understood what the term meant because of this course. At first I balked at having to learn this, but I am on the second to last module of the course, and it has really enlightened me about how vastly the way we develop, offer, and deliver technological services has changed. For example, applications aren’t just built in one, large, arduous project cycle. They are broken up into microservices that are containerized, meaning that they are packaged in containers, or executable units of software where application code is stored with its libraries and dependencies so that it’s portable. Each microservice, or a single application divided into generally related components or services, is worked on by dedicated groups of developers, and each group or team is responsible for working on their assigned microservice. The benefit of this microservice architecture is that each component is worked on and deployed independent of the single application, so the application’s performance won’t be deeply affected when updates are made and deployed. I do not think I would’ve randomly come across this information on my own, so I am grateful for this course.
I decided that I will work on both of these courses during my 30 Days of Code challenge, and I will add in a LeetCode algorithm or two each day as well. I am looking forward to seeing how much my skills strengthen as I review and learn daily.