My first post is supposed to be one on “Why I Wanna Be a Web Developer”, but I’m still sifting through my thoughts on the subject, unable to articulate it well enough. All I know is that I DO WANNA BE a web developer, and I AM GONNA BE a web developer. It’s going to be a really hard and hopefully really rewarding process.

Team Treehouse has proven to be a helpful, and addictive, place to start. I had previously been on the site and not found it helpful, but I think this time, I know that it is just giving me the basics so I can grow from there. When I was on it before, I don’t know if I knew what I was looking for.

What do I mean addictive? Well, on the “leaderboard” right now, I am #12 for number of points gained this week. And I’ve only been on the site 3 days.

So far, I have worked through a project to build a website from scratch. It was far more engaging when I actually worked along than just watching the videos. I also am working on improving my own website - one I bought a domain name (carojane.com) when I was in the process of applying to Launch Academy.

Right now, the website is super basic html. I am figuring my way through the CSS styling and hope to relaunch a much better looking site this weekend.

On Treehouse, I’ve started on the “Intro to Programming” and am learning basic JavaScript, which is interesting, and will really help me understand Ruby even better. I’m on the “Front End Development” track and will move to the “Rails Development” track after I’m finished. I want to go back and and work on the “Web Design” track, too, though I think there’s a lot of overlap anyway.

I like that I can speed up and slow down the video. A lot of the html information was review for me and I got bored sitting through it again. So, I had the video going at 1.75 rate, slowing it down when I needed to pay closer attention to something.

Currently, I am also working my way through “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” and “Pragmatic Programming”, so I need to step away from Team Treehouse some to finish those in the next week. I also really need to figure out Git, so that needs to be a priority coming up.

This is all so exciting and I hope to write more specifically what I’m working on. Right now my brand new computer (as of last Thursday) has more files and programs on it than my old computer ever had!

In the wise words of Ten, “Allons-y Alonzo!”

originally posted Jun 19th, 2014 4:52am on tumblr