One Year Of Coding
Last year I started a journey into the world of computer languages and coding. At first is was super confusing, I had no idea what language to learn, I spent a lot of time just trying to figure that out and honestly I never really did, you don’t really choose one they choose you. I picked C++ because I wanted to get to the nitty griddy, I thought it would be so cool to learn how computers work on a low level so I spent about three months teaching myself the awesomeness of C++.
C++
This was a lot of fun and work, I learned a lot but hardly scratched the surface. I wrote everything I could think of in command line programs with user inputs, I learned about Makefiles, Classes, OOP, setters, getters, Templates and a bunch of other things but I wanted more!. What is next? At this point I really wanted to do stuff I could see so back to the search engine for a graphics libraray. I use linux so most of the examples online that use the graphics.h didn’t work for me, so I found openGL, but I had no idea this was like for people who already know what was going on. After some painfull hours of copy/paste examples and learning nothing I found something called SDL(Simple DirectMedia Layer). This seemed like the answer to everything, I could really learn how to make GUI’s for my crappy console based programs. I spend days and days on lazyfoo.net and got to tutorial 5 maybe. I was really getting it down but I wanted to see more results. My problem was that I was not very good at coding to begin with and going above my paid grade. If I could code simple stuff without thinking then I could move on to this stuff. I needed a better understanding on the whole. After much internal struggle I decided to explorer A more satisfying language. I had done some research into other languages and found that JavaScript had similar syntax to C++ and getting images on the screen was a lot easier with the DOM and CSS all right there, so I said “I will learn a bit of JavaScript to get a handle on coding and graphics then return to C++”….
JavaScript
This turned out to be an easy transition for the most part, instead of int, char, float, double, string and so on we just use var, inplace of cout<<~~<<endl; we just use console.log(). I used a webapp could SoloLearn to make my way through the basics. Now since JavaScript was made for the DOM I had to teach myself HTML and CSS as well, that took a bit longer, I used a few online sources to get the job done. About a year into coding and most of that time spent in this language, I still have so very much to learn but that brought me to another cross road. My idea for my future is to be coding in some language. I realized after learning JavaScript that most of these langs are the same, just little syntactical differences, but also the vase library for each. Anyway back to this part, I found out about databases and realized this is something I really need to learn, plus I really wanted to figure out the forms on a html page. So I did it!, I learned SQL but I found out that others are better for Javascript so I learned Redis but found out that that is for small things like caches so I learned mongodb and found out that it really works perfect. I used PHP at first with SQL but after some learning I found out about Node.js and that was it!. No more learning PHP, I got an okay handle on it and can do some simple stuff still. With node I could get rid of the bulky Apache server running on my shitty craptop and create servers on the fly. Truly amazing. I used to practice code on cloud9 building on a container that could run its out php/apache/sql server but now I can go on glitch.com and make an entire web app. I use mlab for my mongodb, I do run it locally and use vs code. I am in between vs code and atom. I love atom but it is hard to not use intelisense after you have. I really wish atom had that, autocomplete just does not do it justice.,, blah blah.. So rust..
Rust
The next language in my adventure is a small low level lang named rust. The big thing I like about this aside from its low level and C bindings is Crates.io. It is like C++ but with nodes npm. That is all I have right now about rust. I hav not really come up with any ideas for apps. I thought about making a web app but why not use node? IDK I just know I think it is cool. As for C++ I still do some stuff in it. I know that most JavaScript starts as C so…
Summary …
I have so much more road to walk down, I really hope I can make a life with this knowledge I am accumulating, I need to, I want to. I made another weather app today and the looked at the one I made almost a year ago. It is just a simple weather app but It made me think “has this got me anywhere? am I any better at coding?”. I have been learning a new library called Vue.js, it is much like React.js or Angular.js. I plan on learning React.js as well because it seems very popular. I do not plan on learning typescript or Angular.js unless there is money involved, mostly cause of person: string . Why is string lowercase, almost everywhere else in the would it would be person: String.
The weather apps..
The First : I had worked on this one for probably like 2 or 3 days. It was one of the first big app projects I did and the first use of an API.
This was from my FreeCodeCamp days, not that Ive stopped I just branched out, I need to get back to finish I think.
The Second : I put this together cause I needed something to work on my Vue.js skills
I didn’t spend really any time on the css, I finally gave in and started using a stylesheet (bulma) a bootstrap alt.
