The ~15 km wide walk into the wilds and my Web development journey so far: An Analogy
Hello World! Welcome to my yet another article. Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter if you've already and for those who haven't done that yet, Take your time mate you are not missing out on anything anyway :)
This is the Part I, of Two Part series where I've tried to communicate my journey towards software development as a whole.
Who am I?
I am Sahil.
I'm a Final Year E&TC Student from Mumbai, India.
I'm a freelance embedded systems engineer and consultant working with devices based on the 8051 architecture.
I am the Founder of wolvelectronics.in where we sell and rent hobby electronics at the best prices across india :)
I work fluently with frontend web technologies HTML, CSS, SCSS And VueJS.
I have also worked with Vanilla JS, MongoDB, NodeJS And Express, while my understanding on those topics is very superficial, I am continuously learning/adapting things one by one.
Codepen: codepen.io/hashkazi00
Github: github.com/hashkazi00
Portfolio: sahilkazi.ml
Hashnode Blog: sahilkazi.hashnode.dev
LinkedIN: linkedin.com/in/sahilkazi01
WolveElectronics: wolvelectronics.in
Twitter: twitter.com/HashKazi
I am ultra slow at learning(new) things, ultra pro max ordinary, significantly failed, but excellently collaborative and resourceful.
Also I Do The Work Constantly, No Zero Days.
p.s. you don't have to be me after you read this you are well placed the way you are.
Why this analogy?
It's been a long time since I've been ignoring the urge of self reflection that came from within and externally from a few fellow colleagues and friends. So I went on to walk into the wilds(~15km) to figure out what I'll write, walking alone for long lets my thoughts out to be precise 😊.
What is this about and who should read this?🧐🧐
This article is going to be inclined towards my frontend web development journey so far, but if you are a curious person that has nothing to do with web development you may relate to this too, so go ahead give this a try.
It's about my experience as a consistent learner. I'm going to take you from how and why it all started and how I dwelled on the surface of all the frontend web technologies for the first month and then went in depth on a selected few to create a ~sustainable(prefixed ~ because you never know) side income/career for myself.
You should certainly read this if you are interested in learning web development, if you are on the stage of choosing education/learning in any field at all, if you want to dig a well but the hope of finding water has been dwindling in every endeavour that you've attempted so far. Or if you're plain curious with enough time to spend on reading something with no prejudices.
Why I started the search for the next thing to learn?🥺
I am the founder of WolveElectronics.in a startup that primarily focuses on Selling And Renting Hobby Electronics at the best prices across India.
It started as a side project and helped me generate a small revenue which when clubbed with the earnings that I received from teaching(tuitions) secondary school students made me fit for survival month after month, as the only way for me to have money was to earn it, no excuses allowed financially.
Things were smooth financially until the day COVID-19 Arrived and lockdown was imposed India wide, which broke the otherwise broken supply chain of wolve electronics. And along with that I lost Tuitions.
Survival became difficult, one bit at a time😣, thanks to the savings😇.
And then one day I ran across a conversation with one of my mate which led to another conversation, that guided me on what to do next. Just for the sake of survival.
How I ended up in Web development?😄
While looking for work by showing off my embedded systems portfolio(which was really bad) to my network, got me no favourable outcomes. I started on by polishing my embedded skills by reading, practicing and being faithful to what I learned day by day.
I liked it since long, but the learning curve felt so steep that I'd always chosen to drop it off my stack. However, due to lockdown I had all the time the world had to offer me and went deep to find myself working on a freelance project for a client that paid me well to survive the next couple of weeks.
And then it all stopped again. But between all that events I came across(was introduced to) a person who himself ran a web/software development company at Mumbai and was searching for a web development intern. But I was not the right fit for the job due to my lack of knowledge in that field. Anyways I was offered with an option to learn a few things which would make me eligible to be an intern, that's how I started grinding.
The most important of all things was that to start with web development Is an easy task that's what our brain primarily likes if thought in a psychological sense of perception, A child's play. So that's what I did.
But to retain/survive that curve of learning and applying things, takes real effort. As we are cosmically aligned and biologically programmed to give up at the first glimpse of difficulty/labour. But I survived this, and you can survive that too. Only if you give yourself a chance to do so.
Your chances of survival are even when your why? to do something, is clear/sound and audible to you as a whole.
My Journey So Far
- From Home(The Ultimate Comfort Zone) To The Base Of A Mountain.
Left from home with a bag of supplies, some water, a fruit and some extra clothes. Everything looks easy(brains best friend), with a self commitment to reach the destination that was ~21 kilometres apart within 3hrs(to then realise I will fail time).
Heard about a new shiny thing, had all the time in the world, started up learning web development with long term survival in mind, had a few clues from the people around me, had multiple conversations in hope that they'll lead me to something where I could narrow down my focus to take the best of It.
HTML, CSS And JS came up as the pre-requisites given any stack that I would then like to build upon then. So started working on them from multiple online resources a few noteworthy of which were freecodecamp, progate, codeacademy and folks on twitter who created art based on those, so as to feed my creative curiosity and keep things more appealing. I am a bookish animal so along with all these I started to read books on HTML and CSS, namely HTML: The Intuitive Guide by Greg Sidelnikov.
It took me the smallest amount of effort and time(20days) to undergo the first phase of my journey, but what stood In front was a ~giant mountain(Err brainy waves). It was comparatively easy, but only asked for time and patience with a mix of consistent practice.
- From the base of mountain to the top(the resting place).
Having spent a good amount of time learning HTML, CSS along with a few things about JavaScript too(because why not), my learning had very less to do with applying or experimenting on my own. I was in the tutorial hell to be precise. Everything that was taught via tutorials I could do.
Anything beyond tutorials, I could literally have had no idea. Like centring a div inside other div was easy for me, but only the way I learned in Tutorials and with exactly same or very similar code. This came as a realisation when I started with my first personal project.
And everything I looked at making/designing/creating, seemed to be a giant, with me being clueless on how I could possibly do it.
But I persisted, I took note of what I wanted to achieve, I wire framed my ideas, and started building things in isolation. I believed that I have all the information that I consumed somewhere within me waiting to unleash itself.
That's how I discovered another way of effective learning which I could state as below:
- Learn/know the basic pre-requisites to start something.
- Start wire framing/constructing/structuring your ideas to have a direction on what you'll want to build.
- Isolate the whole Idea into a few sub-ideas and add challenging but easy to implement outcomes.
- Use Google/Github to look at other peoples code who've done something similar to what you're aspiring to do and talk to them via social media, take a conscious note of their code/methodology.
- Take consistent breaks.
- Start building your idea, and solve problems as they come one by one by talking to other fellow developers and with the help of stack overflow.
- Go back to parts of tutorials that may help you solve a problem, if you're stuck hard.
- Be curious, ask the why's and how's to the folks all around you or ask google, don't suppress curiosity, search for the answers right there, right then. Don't let your psychological wiring tell you that you'll look into the matter later, focus now.
Disclaimer: One may still fail to do what they might've aspired to, but to know what form/set of ways/actions help you solve the given problem is essentially a life skill. We must try enough to, at least figure out the way of learning that suits us potentially in varying set of circumstances. Doing this helps us stay away from circumstantial blaming that comes out of us for psychological reasons.
This realisation was the one that I suppose took an enormous amount of effort and time(3-4weeks). But on the good side It laid the foundation of all the future endeavours, some failures and some wins. It signalled me to break even with myself as a whole and rest for some time. And thats what I did humans :)
That's all folks 🙂 it's appropriate for me to end this article here. Stay tuned for the final article in this series, where I talk about the longest and most rewarding🎉 part of my journey.