Even now, days after finishing the 100 days of coding challenge, I continue to reflect on the lessons I've learned. It was a journey filled with highs and lows, but ultimately it was an incredibly enriching experience. I learned so much about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, and what it takes to be a successful programmer. In the end, I'm glad I took on this challenge.
In this post, I'd like to share some of my thoughts and what I've learned from those 3 months of coding.
What is the 100 Days of Coding challenge?
100 Days of Code Challenge is an initiative where we commit to take, and spend each day at least 1 hour for 100 days working on problem-solving and personal projects to improve our skills and push our boundaries. So, I had coding experience going into this challenge but I didn't feel confident about my knowledge. I was very much moved by this quote from John Mayer.
If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it.
Keeping this quote in my mind, I started my challenge. By the end of day 1, I was able to create a website with one page. It wasn't anything fancy, but it was still exciting for me. Websites like freeCodeCamp and Frontend Masters had been a great help to me during this journey. After almost 20 days of practicing to make a website, I felt like I was getting pretty good at coding it. I then made different websites using HTML and CSS.
I never expected to be consistent all these 100 days. When I say being consistent is the key, it is. I learned that consistency is very important in programming; without it, you can't achieve anything significant. It is because if you learn one thing one day and you skip a day or more you would forget what you practiced the day before so you have to start it again freshly. And the outcome of your result would never be seen.
My biggest lesson with my coding journey so far has been patience. To get anywhere in life, you need to learn the basics and then build upon them even though it takes you many days. And after days of working on HTML and CSS, I wanted to try something new. So I decided to switch on JavaScript and learn it from the ground up. I had no prior experience with JavaScript, but after spending a few days on it and reading through some tutorials online, I realized that this was going to be a hell of a ride. As I said I had no experience at all, so it was hard for me. I had friends and seniors encouraging and helping me throughout. I was consistent enough so I was getting quite familiar with it. Concepts that seem to be beyond understanding will suddenly make sense. You start to question why you didn't get it the first time. Later I learned different frameworks of JavaScript including React JS and Next JS.