I remember starting this year with a pretty insane list of 2020 New Year resolutions. It is common knowledge though, that New Year resolutions tend to end in February most of the time. Learning to code has kind of being on my list since 2018, but I guess, here we are again. My experience with coding started late last year but I wasn’t really serious with it. In May 2020, I started to get serious about learning how to code again, and now, I’m teaching myself HTML and CSS. Thank you, COVID-19. The present situation of things has opened my eyes to the endless opportunities associated with gaining a skill like this; opportunities to work remotely, to be creative, and so on.
I joined Twitter in January this year. Having been a little active on Twitter for a while now, I came across the #100DaysOfCode challenge, created by Alexander Kallaway.
The 100 Days Of Code challenge seems like a pretty simple challenge, providing a lot of flexibility to the participants. There are only two rules:
1) Code for a minimum of an hour every day.
2) Keep a log or Tweet and/or share your progress using the #100DaysOfCode Challenge hashtag to hold yourself accountable.
After further research into what the challenge is really about, I came across a ton of blogs from people sharing their success stories on how this challenge has impacted their coding journey and also how it has improved their skills.
So, I have decided to end this year by taking part in the 100 Days of Code Challenge.
For more information on that challenge check out this blog post by Alexander Kallaway.
I believe this challenge will be a great way to help get me started on my 2020 coding journey and be very consistent with it. I also believe that in order to become good at something, there is a good reason to commit to doing it every single day for a period of time. According to research, it takes about 66 days to form a habit, and forming good habits is an essential part of being a programmer.
Ok, here’s the thing, I’m specializing in front-end web development. It is really important when starting to learn how to code to focus on what programming language you want to learn before starting out. For front-end web development you need to learn HTML (markup language), CSS (styling language), and JavaScript (programming language) in that order. You need to learn HTML and CSS well enough before jumping right into the programming language which is JavaScript.
For this challenge, I will be focusing on HTML and CSS, then learning JavaScript alongside. I will be building projects solely on HTML and CSS. My plan is to build at least 20 projects in 100 days. I will be grouping the days into chapters, making them 10 days per chapter, which will make a total of 10 chapters. 10 chapters times 10 days equals 100 days. I intend to build at least 2 projects per chapter, this will result in a total of at least 20 projects during the course of this challenge.
I will commit to GitHub for every project I make and create pens on CodePen. I will also be posting 10-day summary blog posts here on Hashnode every ten days. The 10-day summary blog posts will be on the topics I cover for that chapter.
Here are the estimated activities for the chapters and topic that will be covered:
Previous Knowledge
I’ve been working on courses from YouTube, freeCodeCamp, Udemy, Treehouse, Udacity, Khan Academy, and various free bootcamp prep courses and other online tutorials.
Tools
Below is a list of the tools I would be using for this Challenge:
• A Laptop
• Notebook and a Pen
Social
• Slack
• Discord
To see my daily progress, follow me on Twitter @lanre__waju