Prior to 2018, when I was still living in Bali, the term "digital nomad" was becoming popular. I met quite a few digital nomads there, sort of living the dream life: the weather, the beaches, the food, the prices, and so on. At that time, I looked at those people with positive envy—the type of envy that makes you wish you had what they had. And that "something" was their type of job. But, at that moment, apart from building and managing my own online shop through Weebly, I didn't really know where to get started. I asked a few questions and tried to get an internship, but my age was deemed to be not quite attractive for training. So, I moved on and did other things while not very actively self-teaching myself how to work with WordPress.

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Then came April 2021. That was when I got my first paid project. It was a website for a friend who wanted a portfolio site for her poems. The website was built on WordPress. It was an exciting time for me because, even though it was only a $200 project, it was a beginning. Once I got a review, things started to get a bit easier in terms of attracting new clients. I am still building my client base, but the journey has been rewarding and has taught me a few things about myself—something I will talk about in another blog.

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Now, let's get back to my coding journey. This will be the story of many others, I am sure. It was the pandemic. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I knew I would feel guilty wasting it, so I thought, why not get a course on Udemy and finally start learning front-end development? So, I bought a course from John Smilga on Udemy about HTML and CSS. I went through the whole course in maybe two months. It was an exciting journey, especially the first HTML page that I built. I was sort of obsessed with it. I just never imagined how I could create something accessible to the whole world using just my keyboard and mouse (and, of course, the CPU and its little friends).

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After completing HTML and CSS, the next step was, of course, JavaScript. JavaScript was a lot harder than HTML and CSS. It’s where the real coding begins. Many people, I am sure, wouldn't even call HTML and CSS coding anyway. I bought course after course on JS from Udemy. Most of them literally couldn’t keep me awake. My brain was just refusing to take in the information. However, I kept going back to JS because if I were to become a proper web developer, then JS is a must. For the longest time, I kept falling asleep during my online courses. That is why my JS journey has taken so long.

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It has been almost four years now, and even though I can look at JS code and understand what the lines of code do, I still, for the life of me, can’t write an app by myself. I like to think that learning to code is like learning another human language. I’ve gotten to the point where I can read a book and understand 80% of the foreign language I’m learning, but I still can’t write a book. That’s where my JS is at the moment.

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That is really the reason why I am starting this blog. They say the best way to learn is to explain what you learn. So, in my blogs, I will explain the projects I am building and what I have learned throughout the process. I will be using various sources such as YouTube and courses from Udemy, but at the moment, my material will mainly come from Scrimba’s front-end course.

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Let’s take on this journey together, and happy coding!

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