How it all started

Welcome on my blog, you are right now reading my first blog post. This blog will be my platform where I will be able to share my experiences and the things I learned while learning to code. But before I start sharing any of that stuff, I wanted to make this post, because this post will be a kind of an intro to my blog. Just to make it clear I`m not a professional, the languages I currently know are HTML, CSS and JS, and I still have a lot to learn.

In this post I will share the breaf summary of my journey, which includes finding out about coding, wanting to learn coding, learning HTML and CSS, building my first website, struggling with JS and more. So I guess lets jump into it.

My very first encounter with building websites was around a year ago in 2021, when I found out about Wix and a couple other website builders. At the time I didn`t even thought about learning to code, I thought it was some ridiculously hard thing that only some people were able to do, but this is obviously not true. So at the time I did build a couple sites, like the one I made for my dads business(here is the url: https://baitboatrepairs.wixsite.com/baitboatrepairs/shop, if anyone is interested). These sites were pretty minimalistic and simple, mainly because I was just a noob, and didn`t knew a bit about the web or anything that surrounds it.

A couple of months later I started to think about learning to build websites, because I was always quite interested in building stuff so I figured I would learn to build websites, but at the time I didn`t really had the time to do something with this idea, so I just kind of forgot about it. It was the middle of the summer, when I remembered what I wanted to do, and because I had time available I figured “why not”.

Of course like I said, I didn`t knew shit about this kind of stuff, I just knew that I wanted to learn it, so what does somebody do, who wants to learn to code, but doesn`t know nothing about the topic? Well opens up Chrome and types: “How to learn to code?”. This was exactly what I did. I read through a lot of blog posts and articles and I figured I would take a course that would teach me the basics(HTML and CSS). I took the course and learned HTML and very basic CSS, I was finally able to build some very basic stuff and this made me even more passionate about learning. Throughout the course I built a site, so teoretically this was my first site(https://kristof1345.github.io/coursera-website/), but it was not the first site I built independently.

After I finished that course I started to dig into javascript. I don't think I need to explain why I choose JS, I think it is obvious. This time I didn't went with a course like I did before, rather I stuck to books and the good old internet. Learning basic JS by myself was definitly an experience in itself. Im not saying that basic JS is hard or something because it is not, but for some reason I just wasn't able to wrap my head around the language. For example it took me around a week to just understand what variables are. Eventually I learned the very basics of JS and started doing some smaller projects that required JS.

The first website I built independently is the website, you are on right now. This website is my first fully finished and working website. Althought I built a couple sites before this one, none of them were fully finished projects.

Of course between the time of learning HTML, CSS and JS and building my first site I was working on some smaller projects. I found a pretty cool website named Frontend Mentor, where I was able to solve front-end challenges like building an advice generator app. To get better with JS, I started “solving” leetcode problems, but that looked more like copying others solutions because I wasn't able to solve the problems. By now I got better with leetcode, but I still struggle a lot with even the easy problems.

And that is the breaf summary of me learning the very basics of building websites and actually doing some projects. This whole journey took me around 4 and a half months, I probably could have learned web development way faster, but I`m not a fan of rushing things. I hope you enjoyed, this short article about how I got into web development and coding, and stay tuned for future posts.