Leaving the Comfort Zone with Frontend Masters
From Classical Singer to Coder in 365 days — Part II
Armed with the basics of coding thanks to Codecademy, after about 5 months of committed lessons I knew it was time to shift to a new platform. I had deciphered the ins and outs of how to pass lessons and successfully complete projects within their website, and even learned how to ask for help, though I’ll admit that’s still a work in progress.
I was ready to get uncomfortable again by starting to use a new platform to push my growth further. Just kidding! I was really starting to enjoy my comfort zone and did not feel ready to let go of the training wheels just yet. But Frontend Masters managed to make the transition downright enjoyable.
Major shout-out to Brian Holt for being both brilliant and humorous in my first course on the website, Complete Intro to Web Development!
Because I really delved into my coding journey in the middle of a global pandemic, it initially felt like a very solitary endeavor. Up to that point (around late-June) the only voice I heard teaching me about console.log’s and promises was mine — reading the lessons on Codecademy and talking to myself while writing copious notes. Hearing someone else explain the concepts I had previously only managed to muddle through alone was so refreshing.
Diving Right In
I was intimidated at first because I didn’t know what the pacing would be like, immediately assuming that as a novice, it would be too fast for me.
And as a proudly obsessive note-taker I worried I wouldn’t be able to write everything down.
Luckily for me, the team behind Frontend Masters had already taken my concerns into consideration. Each lesson was broken down into bite-size chunks that I could click through with the ease of skipping through a top-hits playlist on YouTube. I could pause, restart and replay sections I had already viewed, whether because I didn’t catch the whole explanation or I just didn’t understand it the first time.
Not only that, but they offered a variety of playback speeds, so I could choose a pace that I felt comfortable with, as well as consistently well-timed closed captions. I’m fortunate that I have pretty good hearing, but when functional programming variables and their scopes were being thrown at me, it was so nice to have the captions enabled so I could visualize the words being spoken.
When I preferred to re-read the lessons, the transcript for each course was provided at the very beginning along with the slides for each presenter so I could skip around to the section I really needed to see in writing.
Also to note, they update their courses regularly to make sure they are providing the most up-to-date and relevant content. Thank you for not making me go all the way back to 2008 for JavaScript: The Good Parts!
Choosing my Yellow-Brick Road
They have several Learning Paths available, including Beginner, Professional, and Expert but also specific Topic Paths that range from Angular to Webpack.
Knowing that they had content specifically designed for someone still at the beginning of her journey made me feel confident I had chosen something accessible.
Each course had a unique flavor thanks to the variety of industry professionals on their teaching roster. With just over 31 hours of video instruction, which probably took me about 2 months to get through in its entirety, the Beginner learning path exposed me to five different teachers and aspects of web development.
- Complete Intro to Web Development, v2 by Brian Holt
- Getting Started with JavaScript, v2 by Kyle Simpson
- CSS Grids and Flexbox for Responsive Web Design by Jen Kramer
- JavaScript: From Fundamentals to Functional JS, v2 by Bianca Gandolfo
- Mastering Chrome Developer Tools, v2 by Jon Kuperman*
*When I completed the Learning Path, this was the 5th course. However, since my completion of the courses in Fall 2020, they have updated the curriculum! The 5th course is now Website Accessibility by Jon Kuperman, and they offer Mastering Chrome Developer Tools and Modern Search Engine Optimization as Elective Coursework.
From the get-go, I was setting up my Terminal and using the command line. I was walked through how to download prewritten code so I could then retool it in my own code editor, Visual Studio Code. I made a GitHub account so I could save references to each teacher’s courses, and see how other programmers maintained and edited their code.
Diving into these courses forced me to take coding from the safety of an all-inclusive single-page website, into real life.
I was challenged to venture outside the comfort zone I’d developed with Codecademy, but in a way that still felt supported. Projects were no longer walked through step by step, but rather presented as an overarching goal. I was given guidelines but it was up to me to figure out how to reach a solution.
I built up my knowledge gradually because of the challenges that came with that discomfort. All of a sudden, I had to take the principles of Flexbox and recreate a Mondrian painting with Flexbox Grid.
All along the way, each instructor was encouraging and supportive to their class of students, making me feel like I was right there with them taking the class live. Some teachers were highly interactive with the class, like Bianca Gandolfo’s class on Functional Programming that also moonlights as a Clue mystery game. Some were less elaborate, sticking to the fundamentals with fine-tuned specificity, like Kyle Simpson. (He also happens to be the author of You Don’t Know JS: Scopes and Closure, two concepts that are notoriously confusing especially to newer developers, so you can rest assured he knows what he’s talking about.)
Ongoing Learning…?
The time I wasn’t spending watching courses and working on projects, I devoted to strengthening my coding muscles with the additional suggested resources provided by each instructor.
I played Flexbox Froggy to learn vertical alignment, studied illustrative diagrams to understand specifishity in class-selectors, and took advantage of websites like CSS Tricks that broke down new technology and confusing concepts into manageable chunks I could understand.
Each time I started the next course on my learning path, I felt more confident. As the course material evolved, I evolved right along with it.
About halfway through these courses, I experienced a truly defining moment. I was talking with my partner one night over dinner, each of us going over our respective days, when he asked what I had learned that day. This was a recurring question but one I usually answered somewhat generically.
“I read about async and await…”
“I figured out the difference between const and let…”.
But this time was different. I said I was learning about promises and proceeded to explain what a promise was. I looked at him expectantly as I finished my explanation, assuming he would defer to one of his favorite phrases, “Well… sort of, but you’re making it too complicated.”
To my surprise, he met my gaze then proudly nodded and smiled. I didn’t just understand something theoretically, but I was able to express my knowledge in a succinct and assured way. In that moment I remembered something else he had told me several months earlier.
“Being able to confidently express what you have learned makes people confident in your ability to learn quickly and efficiently.”
The proud look on his face wasn’t just about me understanding a tough concept, it was because I had actually taken in the information well enough that I could turn around and put it to use.
I hadn’t gone to Computer Science school and I didn’t have a degree in software development, but over the past 6 months I had been able to integrate the knowledge from hours of studying and staring at MDN documentation.
I was still a newbie and I think I might always be. But I had proven to myself that I was no longer at the HTML point in my education. Codecademy taught me the structural foundation of coding, and Frontend Masters encouraged me to be confident enough to start building on that foundation.
If you enjoyed this article, check out my first post and then keep your eyes peeled for the final installment in my three-part series on how I went from Opera Singer to Front-End Developer in less than a year.
Have any questions or thoughts to share? Feel free to DM me on Twitter @jessica_nicolet.
