Lots of things have happened since the last post. The ones that are relevant for here are that instead of continuing with freecodecamp, I signed up for Launch School. After spending over a year on it, I’m most of the way through the main courses. I’m almost ready to start the last one.
Having a well-defined path of what to study, having TA’s to check assignments, required written tests and interviews, and a big final project make it a much better experience than FCC was. There’s no set time limits, but they expect a certain number of hours of study per week.
I’m very glad I did the FCC projects. I learned a lot about basic front-end development. But with FCC it felt like going too quickly to impressive-looking projects. I got to the React projects and had no idea what I was really doing or why I needed it. I gave up around the intro to D3 since that was unclear also.
When you learn to play the piano, you spend lots of time playing scales, arpeggios and chord progressions, over and over in every key backwards and forwards. That’s the only way you’ll understand new pieces you’ve never seen before. Without that, you’d be limited to memorizing your favorite pieces by rote.
Launch school teaches programming a similar way to how music is taught – simple exercises over and over before you try to build anything. When you play music, the goal isn’t to get ninety-five percent of the notes right. Launch School has similarly high standards. Unlike a performance, though, you can go back and correct your mistakes if there aren’t very many.
If there are a few too many, they might give you some special assignments before you can pass. Some posts related to that are forthcoming.