At the beginning of the year, I made a mental note and reminded myself of my desire to start some sort of structured learning in front-end development. I am currently a product designer and have had some encounters (a mix of sweet and not-so-sweet) with developers when translating design to code so I thought to start some front-end dev learning.
The year kept rolling by and I kept procrastinating on it, but sometime in May, I saw that Hertechtrail had another cohort starting in July and so I decided to enroll for the Web development starter course. The classes started and although I had a rough idea, but nothing really practical about HTML, I started to learn some things. I began to understand how every element on a webpage needed to be structured properly.
We were given assignments frequently, and that was when it was clear to me what I could do and what I couldn’t do, as they say “it’s easier to prepare soup with the mouth”. Thankfully, the coaches Broma Gift and Faith kalu were quite helpful; but I soon realized that, just like regular school, there has to be some sort of personal learning and input to properly grasp new concepts. So, anytime I encountered a blocker, I tried to resolve it myself first before reaching out to either my group or the coaches.
The cohort training ended with a capstone project where I was supposed to create my Dev portfolio to showcase all I had learned. From the capstone project, I learned how to read someone else’s code as I had to fork an already existing portfolio template; I believe this will help me onboard into a new team as I look forward to internships and entry-level roles.
Overall, I’d say the program was practical and I’ve learned quite a lot, I plan to keep working and improving my Dev skill and take more advanced courses.
Thank you Hertechtrail, and my coaches.
Here’s a link to the dev portfolio I created.