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How to learn something that feels just out of your reach.
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I’ve heard this statement so often that I feel like it’s a cliche—often said by someone offering a kind word of encouragement when things get rough. While the comment is correct, sometimes it’s hard to see how.
With the news and events of the past year as the backdrop, a fair number of people (myself included) took all the extra time to learn something new. Maybe adding a hobby, improving skills, or changing careers. I opted to shift my career focus and add a whole raft of new skills in front-end development.
I’ve been hand-coding HTML and CSS for years. I have kept up with trends, and while not using all of my knowledge in coding daily, I could dust off the skills and get something done. I wanted to do more, open up new opportunities. So I started learning by improving my WordPress, getting a handle on Guttenburg blocks and their styling. I even touched back to the basics since I had the time. But I quickly remembered where my education ended and why. In a word, JavaScript.
I can say I had a very high-level understanding of how things functioned but not much skill in writing any of it from scratch. I could search how to fix my problem and maybe modify it to fit my needs. In the end, I would rely on jQuery for most things. It felt cheap, but the few clients I was working with didn’t need anything more in-depth than what Bootstrap offered.
Fast-forward 7 months or so, and I’m thinking about the title of this post. Learning a new language is challenging; doing it in pandemic even more so. I’ve been using Linkedin Learning, FreeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, and a handful of Javascript reference sites. There’ve been days I feel like I’m headed in the wrong direction. But in the past week, the concepts have clicked into place. No matter what, I’ve tried to keep moving, keep learning, and keep practicing.
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