I recently enrolled in a Codecademy Pro Intensive course on Building Website from Scratch.
If you’re asking yourself why I would do such a thing when I’ve already been coding websites professionally for 7+ years. Well the answer is simple really.
When I began my career as a web developer I dove right in. I didn’t know everything yet, but I had enough knowledge to learn on the go as I wrote about in a longer blog post about my experiences on Manoverboard.com. I learned and gained experience in a real world environment, similar to enrolling in french immersion as a way to learn french as fast as possible. But I’ve always enjoyed learning in school as a student.
That’s why I enrolled in the Codecademy Pro Intensive. It allowed me to take a step back, forget what I thought I knew, and see what a reputable organization would teach in a web development course today. After all, I begin coding while the browser wars, and antiquated versions of internet explore were still big issues. HTML and CSS have come a long way since then, and I wanted to see if I was missing out on anything.
In the end I can honestly say I learned some new tricks, and don’t regret participating one bit. In the end, I made a simple responsive website as a thesis project for the course. It’s less complex than the vast majority of sites I produce day to day (for instance, no need to deal with wordpress and php!) but i think it has value in its own right. And sometimes its nice to casually work on something that your paycheck isn’t depending on. You can check it out here on GitHub pages:
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