In spring 2020, with time in my hands, I decided to try and give our WordPress business webpage a complete overhaul, both in design and content. It was my first contact ever with code.

I got curious, and by summer 2020 I was doing all the free "teach yourself how to code" courses I could find. All of them! A month later, I had managed to get some structure, and settled mostly on two open source free resources: freeCodeCamp.org and The Odin Project, with sporadic jumps to and tons of help from MDN web docs and w3schools. I was hooked.

In fall I went back-end. JavaScript had shown me the world of algorithms, and I loved them... until I hit a brick wall. I had to slow down, and start learning some basic concepts. I shifted towards the courses by The Odin Project and other Vikings around, and thus I met Ruby. Ruby was a different dimension, and I really struggled with the abstraction, but somehow I got on. And I discovered I feature quite an interesting stubborn streak.

I became algorithm addicted: I did tons of daily challenges at edabit and started following the Ruby track at Exercism. Over and over again, I am impressed by all the nice, patient and helpful people around.

My next project was Harvard's CS50's Introduction to Computer Science course, which I loved. I wasn't sure this wasn't going a step back, but dearest Exercism is really slow due to their massive update to v3, so the timing was good (I really miss the mentored way of working though).

It turns out that without the knowledge I have acquired over the last few months, I wouldn't have had a chance at CS50. Finishing the part on C was a highlight (phew), and then I had to give Python a chance. It's definitely not been love at first sight: I do miss Ruby... The upside was that SQL was the first intuitive thing I had done in a while. And Django finally gave me the connection between front and back end!

And so I kept going, this time with Harvard's CS50 Web Programming with Python and JavaScript... None my favoutite language, but that's how much I enjoyed these courses. Being able to do a functioning Mail, Twitter and Ebay version was definitely a highlight!

But then I reached the end of CS50 Web Programming, and I started with my final project... and I spent almost a month seriously struggling. It was ok-ish as long as I kept going, but then I hit a wall and suddenly the frustration was way bigger than the fun. The turning point was, once again, Exercism. I started the Python track only to realize I had no clue about the language, and when I found myself googling how to iterate over a list of tuples I decided this had to change! So no final project submission -- for now at least ;)

The new plan was to spend some time with Python, then with Django, then with... React? Knowing me, and with the perspective of the world starting to turn around again, I didn't plan that far.