One of my favourite things to read on Medium are stories of how established developers started their journey coding. It’s fascinating reading of all the different starting points people come from. I’ve noticed a pattern when reading about fellow campers who have finished their journey and have now moved on to bigger and better things. It seems the first two weeks in their journey are often glossed over, specifically everything from challenge 1 to the end of the final basic front end development project.

I get it. It’s nothing more than rudimentary HTML and CSS, with the introduction to a few frameworks. For a veteran reflecting back on their experiences, it makes sense to skip past most of that. For someone like myself, who continues to struggle with even the most simple aspects of HTML, I would have loved for someone to mention the projects are way more challenging than I was anticipating.

For new campers, I want to share the resources that have been most useful to me in the first weeks of code camp:

REAL LIFE DEVELOPERS:

I’m lucky that I work at a company that gives me direct access to some brilliant developers that were happy to answer all of my questions. They were the first to reassure me that it should be this difficult and it will get easier. If you know anyone that is proficient at development, ask them as many questions as you can and don’t be afraid to sound stupid. They had to show me how to create an index.html file. Like an empty one. That’s like, the easiest thing ever.

2. THE NET NINJA BOOTSTRAP 4 TUTORIAL:

After speaking to the developers and watching this, everything I learned about bootstrap made so much more sense. I find with the code camp lessons, it can be easy to follow patterns and not actually understand what’s happening. The Net Ninja does a great job at describing everything in detail that you’ll need to know to complete your first two projects.

3. getbootstrap.com:

If you’ve done the first two things, you probably already know that Bootstrap is just a CSS framework. That was something that took me a while to understand. Basically, all that means is someone has done all of the work in setting up classes for us in CSS, so we don’t have spend hours doing custom styling that we don’t really understand. They explain everything you can do with bootstrap on the website and you can actually just copy most of the code that you’ll be using for your projects from there.

4. w3schools.com:

This place is like the ultimate cheat sheet for when you inevitably forget how to do everything in HTML and CSS. You’ve probably already come across it but do not underestimate the value of this resource. It helped me so much with the language and vernacular that’s used in supplementary material e.g. the difference between an element and attribute.

If you feel like you’re spending too much time on the first two projects, you’re probably not. Mine are far from perfect but they took me hours and I couldn’t have done it without help from the above resources. I hope this information helps you as much as it helped me!

For the curious: my tribute page & my portfolio page