Hello! I'm Tobias Hagnere, a 22 years old student developer from Northern France, living (from the date this was posted) in Dunkirk, famously known for his history, but not for our programming or tech industries. I wanted to start my blog about my journey through the programming industry. I have to put a warning right at the start: If you're reading this to learn more about languages, frameworks, the mental to have, or some new techs, you shouldn't stay around. This space will mostly talk about my adventure through becoming an accomplished (or not so lost) front-end full-time developer. So, if it can get you interested, I hope you will have a good read, and I'm always appreciating some feedbacks!
The beginning.
My knowledge of programming was always a bit short, being the son of an enthusiast computer user and also a programmer (must say, I was grinding his quests on World of Warcraft at the age of 8 during his coffee break), I have always been surrounded by that environment of technologies and curiosity about what our machines could do. I have never been the most disciplined student during school, but I was always trying out things and putting the logical sense in every project or thing I had to do: After a brief college time in History classes (which I loved, but didn't fit me well on the long run), I decided to take a part-time job and get myself into a two-year diploma on basic programming (BTS SIO). The program wasn't oriented towards development at first, but mostly around computer hardware, servers, and network knowledge, which got me into the basis of HTML, CSS, and a little of Java, but mostly around SQL and computer languages.
From that, I graduated and acquired my first programming diploma, but felt that my skills were very low and unreliable for a good-paying job. (most of the jobs with the skills I had were around 15K/€). That's where I decided to learn on my own, and get myself moving on the road to becoming a Full-stack developer.
Learning a job is about Technicity and mentality.
At first, I watched some Youtube videos and took some courses and advice from people around me about what path to take on, I was aiming for specific jobs and skills that felt interesting and complex to me. The jobs offered were scary (the Impostor Syndrome hitting hard even though I didn't have any good skills at that time) when I looked at the french programming market, but that didn't stop me from starting somehow.
I had the chance to take some Udemy Courses from my dad's account and got myself into HTML & CSS. My goal was to become a Full-Stack MERN (MongoDB, Express, React and NodeJS) Developer, which seemed to be the trend when I started (May 2022). Achieving this and mastering those languages would have given me the majority of the skillset that was needed to land a job, from what I was thinking, but guess I was all wrong from the start.
I had myself trapped in this cycle. When I learned HTML & CSS and got myself into JavaScript basis, I was optimistic, the motivation and the learning process felt great, but it started to get worst with time and failures on my projects: I wasn't fully prepared mentally at that time (and it still can't say I am fully prepared, it's all about always learning to manage our equilibrium) which cost me a sentiment of incapabilities towards what I was doing, and so, on my motivation and my abilities to learn more.
And that's how I dropped it for a few months.
From what I can tell, looking at those months backward, I didn't give myself enough rest to appreciate what I learned and what projects I did, even small as they were. Watching one of the Fireship's videos on "How to Land a 100K/yr Tech Job" made me realize I was cycling between the pain of debugging and learning, and the sadness of this loop, without even taking the time to reflect and appreciate the small steps I made every time or every hour.
How to (seriously) get back on track.
From my perspective and my own experience during those months, I had taken, far away from programming, things went easy, and I regret it.
I had a job that permitted me to live with the amount of money I needed, but I was a bit more ambitious about my life, I lost myself in this somewhat comfort of the current work I had, without the perspective of the future.
Hopefully for me, I met a girl who got my ambition back into doing things more seriously. I won't tell you to find your perfect partner to get yourself to work, It worked for me, but that ain't a proper solution!
I took some time to reflect on my past efforts, what I lacked wasn't motivation and will to learn, or interest, it was discipline.
Discipline has always been a big problem in my entire life, even though I always put the effort into things, and the seriousness needed in having things sorted out, I wasn't as regular as I should have been during my first try-out on programming. It didn't take me time to understand what my weakness was: I wasn't prepared enough mentally to learn, to be disciplined, and to accept the pain and the long-term investment that coding is. To resolve that, I acted on several stuff in my life :
I got myself forced into the sport, at least 3 times a week, to give myself a sense of discipline and force myself to be regular. I always loved sports, but never really took the time to do them properly.
I took a class on Development, for which I pay 300€/months on OpenClassRooms, a french learning platform that gives me resources, projects to do, a weekly meeting with my mentor to help me build up my projects and my questions, virtual meetings around the jobs of technologies, and more. Having myself forced to pay a fee is a way to motivate and keep myself doing things even when I feel the lowest or less passionate about a subject, it is how I work!
I also took more Udemy Courses, not only on the technical side of the development but also on the mental side of it, I needed to learn more about how real engineers plan their day, what is going on in their minds, what mindset or techniques they use to get through projects, days, and in their heads.
On another bright side of life, I also opted to get my head cleared out more often, either by going out, doing guitar, listening to some music, or even doing some cleaning (something I love doing, don't judge me and my taste!)
As you can see, there are many ways of getting your head sorted and ready to learn. I encourage you and everyone to try out things and find your comfort habits throughout getting out of your comfort zone. There are real scientific studies about how doing something else for a time can help your brain to think faster and clearer than before your break, the frustration seems to be a big factor of inefficiency to me.
a few other things I did, apart from starting this blog, is creating a Twitter account for new tech, Programmation, and other related stuff. I don't use it often, but it stonks my curiosity for a few minutes of the day and can get my head right back into all this magnificent world.
What now?
As of today (11 January 2023), I'm still taking all of my classes and courses daily, for a minimum of 4 to 5 hours a day, while working on my part-time job and myself. my learning curve is getting bigger so with my curiosity, I have found a great balance between my own life, and my new passion for Programmation and I still got tons to learn about it.
I'm now fixed on my career plans, I have got a portfolio project coming up (which I will blog about in the next weeks), and I attend to learn more about Front-end development, as I would like to make it my career, and I have learned how my status and Github are important in our modern world! (as you can see on the screenshots, my commits do talks for my regularity...)
I ain't taking myself as an example now, I would like people to give me advice on how to get myself better at learning, to share with others about it, and of course, to write down all of my progressions and curiosity about technologies I'm in touch with! (I might write a bit about APIs and fetch soon enough, as I'm dealing with my own Football Fixtures API for my family to use!). My next objective is to keep learning, learning, and learning, building myself a portfolio and projects to show I understood the basis of the languages I use, the structuration and the logical aspects of things, and get myself into useful frameworks for design mostly (such as Bootstrap, Tailwind frameworks) and moving out to another country with my girlfriend (working as a 2D/3D Composer, we're doing the pair !).
Hope you had a great read, and even if it doesn't reach out as I was pleased to write it down, I'm looking forwards to writing more about my learnings on a more technical level!