JuniorLearnsToCode

Recently I've had the opportunity to be a co-host and a speaker at the Sarajevo  OpenWeb Meetup , which I have been a member for quite a while now. Public speaking is not something I've done many times so this was a valuable experience for me.  Le me getting ready to preach After announcing the meetup and the others presenters I left my presentation for the end, because I'm incredibly polite, just like that. I spoke about my experiences while doing the #100DayOfCode challenge, about the challenge itself, what I've figured while doing it (about 240+ days of coding now) and about the mistakes I've made along the way and what I've learned from those mistakes. Das nerds  "Memes make a presentation interesting" - Aristotle More memes. And even more memes... I want to thank my home boy Adnan Kicin for the opportunity. 😊 So, if you are in Sarajevo come and join us , every last Tuesday in the month.  Thanks for readin...

I've been using Gulp as a task runner casually on a couple of projects, I wouldn't call my self an expert on it (or an expert in any other technology - yet) but I figured out how to use it to increase my productivity and automate the repetitive tasks, like code minification, image compression etc.  That being sad, I never really used Grunt.js until very recently, I had a client who got a template which had grunt files for "running" the boring tasks, I told the client that I haven't used Grunt yet, but that I did have some experience with another task runner tool -Gulp.  So basically I just looked up a few tutorials and the official Grunt documentation and was able to set it up and get it working on the client's machine over a remote desktop connection. The takeaway here, at least for me, was that the tool you are using doesn't matter as much, as long as you know one type of certain tool, using another one which does something simil...

Recently I gave my first speech at meetup for a local Free Code Camp group here in Academy 387 in  Sarajevo.  I talked about things that worked for me in getting started with freelancing on Upwork.  Free Code Camp - Sarajevo It was an interesting experience for me - doing something for the first time usually is. Originally I prepared a presentation that had 15-16 slides and I anticipated that if I talk about a minute for each slide that whole speech would be somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes long.  Presentation by Hadžiavdić Sakib on Functional Programming I asked Sakib aka Sake to go first with his presentation because I was just a bit nervous since it was my first meetup talk. He gave a really interesting overview on functional programming paradigm, with focus on Scala. Le me starting my talk on How to Get Started on Upwork All the anxiety went away as soon as I started presenting, the talk lasted a bit longer then I expected, as I kept ...

Now this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Learning from courses and following along with tutorial is fine, especially when you're just starting out, but, there comes a point when that is no longer sufficient. If you spend too long relying only on tutorials you're not only going to stagnate when it comes to improving your skill, you also risk of getting bored.  As in other fields, if you feel like it's easy and you're feeling comfortable, that's a strong indication that you're doing something wrong. Think about it It took me quite  while to figure this out, for the first year of my learning I mostly relied on online tutorials, FreeCodeCamp, Udemy courses, etc.  While I was still trying to get to know the basics learning from courses was fun and it felt secure and risk free. I really started learning when I began working on my first projects, for example, I was under impression that CSS layout was something impossible to learn but aft...

So, I just completed the second round of  #100DaysOfCode challenge , making it 200 days of code! In the second round I mostly focused at getting better with core PHP, Laravel and WordPress, also I've done some freelance work as well, most related to PHP/WordPress stuff.  Last year, when I didn't know about this challenge and I was mostly coding along with tutorials, I had only 19 GitHub contributions, in 2018, mainly because of this challenge I had over 800 contributions! While doing the 100 Days of Code, I came across a lot of interesting people, talked a few friends into starting the challenge as well. From my perspective, when starting the challenge it's a smart idea to pick a technology and focus on it. I made a mistake in the first round by jumping from this framework to that library. So, I rectified my mistake in the second round and focused almost exclusively on learn PHP, getting to know Laravel MVC and diving deeper into making custom WordPress themes. ...

Recently I needed a bit of help to finish a freelance project withing a tight deadline so I decided to outsource a part of work.  I've been using Upwork in the past few months as a freelancer, but outsourcing some work gave me a valuable insights on how the whole things appears from a client's perspective. I need a few WordPress pages completed,  as I do freelancing  myself I know how frustrating it can be when a job has unclear or misleading requirements. So I made sure that job requirements are short as possible, concise and easy to understand. Despite all that more than half of the proposals I received contained questions that would not have been necessary if the applicant had read the job description.  That being said it was obvious that most freelancers that applied were just using templates for applying as most of the cover letters looked very similar. I used to make this mistake when I first started freelancing and I know with certainty that when...

Recently I had to work with a client who was a Mac user and I'm a Windows type of a bloke.  I accessed the client's machine over remote desktop, for a practical tutoring lesson on how to setup and use build tools. It took me by surprise, a bit, when I saw that he was using Mac OS X I though I might embarrass myself , but then I remembered that real ninjas don't panic so I just opened up the terminal, instead of poking around the file explorer (File Finder I believe it's called on Mac). After that it was mostly smooth sailing. I've been using Unix commands via  Git Bash on Windows for a quite a while and it sure has paid off.  There are plenty of operating systems out there and each has their own unique Graphical User Interface and it's hard to know your way around all of them. One of the advantages of knowing the command line is that is it's an universal tool, especially Unix commands, same command will work on both Linux and Mac. Unix command line c...