The Developing Developer

 JavaScript30 I'm a couple days into the JavaScript30 course by Wes Bos. It's 30 videos of building projects with JavaScript (no libraries, just JavaScript, CSS, and HTML). I'm enjoying it so far, and I've been learning a lot. What I've been learning the most is that I am still a novice when it comes to programming languages. I've ran into multiple things in the first few day of the course where I find myself asking, "what is that line of code and how does it work?". I'll try and look up a YouTube video or two and that does not always help. I'm going to dig into the code that this challenge is using, but my main focus is to build things with JavaScript and grow in my overall knowledge over these next 30 videos. Switching it Up A majority of my learning has been happening in more structured video "classes" (i.e. Udemy courses). Now I'm coding along with somebody who is not building on small concepts one by one in that same way. I...

 It Actually Is Around four and a half hours a week. That's my rough average of the amount of time I've spent on actively learning how to code these last few weeks. Why am I telling you this? Why do you think? It's important to know how much time you spend on something. The more time you spend actively practicing and learning, the faster you will get better at that thing. Since I want to reach my goal of having a pretty good handle on programming in around the next six months, I need to put in the hours to actually learn and grow as a developer.  What That Means Practically I've started "clocking in" when I code. I do this so I actually know how much time I'm spending day-to-day and week-to-week in my developing developer journey. This can begin to create a feed-back loop for me. I also analyze the data that those hours offer me. This data can help me to know how dedicated I actually am to learning this new skill set. If I spend seven hours one week, but o...