Learning Time

One challenge that I think most beginners face in their coding journey is going through what I like to call the "dark" phase. This is when the amount to learn all at once is too high, and what you must accept is that you only need to know 20% of what is happening to accomplish the task. For a long time I felt this way about the behemoth that is AWS web services. I also thought the same about data structures and algorithms.

This challenge stood out to me as I went into my Deep Dive week. So I decided to take CS50: An Introduction to Computer Science, a free online course run by Harvard University. I watched some introduction lectures for the first week of material, which was enough to catch my interest. I also worked my way through the 2nd half of the Gatsby tutorial.

Reddit and Podcasts

One gem that this Deep Dive week gave me was that I stumbled upon a programming podcast while exploring Spotify called Software Daily. jam packed with interviews and discussions on basically any programming topic, this podcast was perfect for me to listen to while on walks or driving, all those times where being in front of an actual computer was not possible.

I also took some time out of my day to find several subreddits related to programming. One difficult part of my Deep Dive experiment that I was facing was due to COVID. I was no longer able to access in person meetups, and it seemed like even a lot of online events were not happening instead. I knew that I would need to push myself to find coding communities to engage with. While i don't post much on Reddit, I have found reading over people's experiences in the world of programming super helpful

My thoughts on the day

Day 2 was also very successful. I felt energised from the progress I was making. While some people reading may think that perhaps I am not "accomplishing" in their eyes, at the time these were big changes for me. I was immersing huge parts of my life into software, something that I hadn't done for a while. I was trusting my curosity, and having fun with my efforts.