I have officially completed two days of my course on front-end web development and I am amazed at how much I feel I’ve learned. I’ve played around with HTML and CSS for quite some time, albeit casually and just in my spare time, but I’ve never had any formal training. Programming is one of those things that you can actually still be self-taught in (unlike brain dissections, from my previous life as a researcher. I do not recommend teaching yourself those). Having said that, if anything I learned some very good programming habits in the past two days. While a lot of the content of the course was a bit familiar, I knew how to use certain concepts, but I never knew really why. It can also be argued I learned by trial and error and that is just tedious. More than once I’ve been up deep into the night because something just wasn’t working, and I am sure that will happen again at some point, for this the past two days every line of code I’ve written worked beautifully.

One exception: at some point I forgot a }. Everything broke. The lesson in that was that now I know where to look for the mistake in my code and I can fix it faster than I would have been able to before.

As I wrote before, taking this course is part of my mission of fully enjoying living in London. I had been looking for a course to take for some time, but many of them run for several weeks and there is not a month I am not away at least a few days on business. This makes taking any longer running course really challenging. The course I am now taking runs only for a week, full-time, and is offered by Steer.

There should be more courses structured like that. I can find a week here and there that I can take off, but I would not be able to commit to something for multiple months for a few nights a week. I am sure I am not the only professional in that boat! As far as this goes, Steer is hitting the mark. As for content and good instructors, I am impressed as well.

I am always very tempted to just run with things, but this time around I took a beginners course on purpose. I wanted to reset the clock on everything I’ve taught myself by looking at WordPress templates, and start from scratch. I really couldn’t be happier with that decision. There are enough situations in life we do things without knowing why, at least now I know the purpose of every line of code I write without any guessing games.

Stay tuned for more updates on what we are actually working on in class!