Journey to fullstack
This week I was meant to be working on the hospital prices aggregator site. I didn't, so I don't have much of an update to share on that. I think this has been part procrastination and part wanting to make progress with other projects/ideas that I already had in queue.
My main focus at the moment is getting into web development. I have a background in software development, but until now I had never delved deep into HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I've been at it for several months, but I'm not sure I've done a good job of sharing my journey, connecting with others or gaining visibility. I've spent many hours on this but I don't have that much to show for it.
This becomes a handicap specially when trying to get a job in something in which you don't have much professional experience. Recent feedback I've got is that I should be putting more stuff up on GitHub. You either have proven professional experience in relevant roles or you have a healthy portfolio that proves you know your way around these technologies.
I enjoy coding very much and I also want to build my own products one day, so it just makes sense to keep making and showcasing stuff and connecting with people. It's an aligned strategy.
So this week I started a repository where I'll be adding notes and resources for learning web development as I go along. It'll provide the following benefits:
Aid learning. By writing down what I'm learning, I'll get improved understanding and recall.
Improve GitHub activity stats. Appearances matter. It's not good enough to be awesome and super productive. If nobody knows - or worse still, if you're giving out the wrong impression - you'll miss many opportunities.
Improve the visibility of what I'm learning. In the same vein, having a registry of the things I'm learning and accomplishing will be a valuable addition to an actual portfolio.
Help others. By publicly documenting the resources, projects and strategies that I'm using to become a better fullstack developer, others might benefit from it. Double win.
As a bonus, the repo is a Gatsby site using MDX, courtesy of gatsby-mdx. It deploys super easily to GitHub pages by running npm run deploy, courtesy of gh-pages.
If you reached this far, there's a chance you're interested 😉. Feel free to fork or start your own journey-to-fullstack inspired repo.