When you are on the journey of working through the challenges it’s easy to focus on the Front End Developer Certificate and sometimes not so easy to focus on the challenge at hand.

Not focusing and not teaching myself to slow down is the biggest mistake I made when working through challenges. I was so focused on getting to that next level, becoming a developer, and coding for nonprofits, that I overloaded my brain with a lot of content in a short amount of time.

When completing a challenge, it’s easy to go on to the next, then the next, and then the next one after that. Try to stop after each challenge and practice what you have learned.

Let’s say you are working on one of the JavaScript challenges that requires you to split, reverse, then join a string. When you complete that challenge, go to CodePen, create a new pen, and practice.

Take at least 10 minutes to sit there and split, reverse, and join strings using JavaScript. Add HTML to it if you would like, try different things with it and once you are comfortable and can successfully do this in your sleep, move to the next challenge!

Trust me, doing a lot of challenges in a short amount of time gets you through the map faster but hurts you in the long run if you do not know the content.

Slow down, take your time and simply practice. You can keep CodePen open in a tab and use it to practice all of your challenges as you work through them. If you don’t know how to add JavaScript or other resources to CodePen, I have an article explaining how to do that, after you read mine, check this article out, it's more advanced.

Setting Goals In a Timely Manner