Last year I was in my third year of college, and was felt like it was not for me. For years I struggled thinking whether college was the right choice for me or not. Last year, I decided to take a one-year break from college and explore new things; that's when I found out about coding and Flatiron School.
During the year I took off college, I found out about coding, and it immediately caught my attention, and I did a lot of research to have a better idea of what it is. While doing this research, I found out about Flatiron School and its coding Bootcamp and immediately started trying the free courses it offered. After weeks of trying out the free courses and thinking about whether learning code was the right thing for me or not, I made up my mind to start on this new journey of learning to code.
On March 15, 2021, I started the Online Coding Bootcamp at Flatiron School, and although it has been very challenging, I haven’t been this excited in a very long time. These past three weeks have been a rollercoaster of emotions, going from feeling extremely stressed and about to give up to extremely happy and proud of the work I'm doing. In these last few weeks, I had to study almost every day, something I was never a fan of. However, this time it's different; even if I have to sit in front of my computer all day, I feel proud of myself because I learn something new about coding by the end of the day.
I just finished the third week of the program and did my first project. For this project, I had to build a Single Page Application (SPA) using everything I’ve learned until now. Before the project, I thought multiple times that maybe coding was not for me because I would struggle with some classes and assignments, but now that I finished my project, seeing what I am capable of doing makes me really proud of myself. A month ago, I knew nothing about coding, and now I’m able to build a spa all by myself.
For this project, we were asked to create a SPA that communicates to a public API. I decided on an API about anime because I'm a fan, and I thought it’d be fun to do my first project about something I like and enjoy. I created a SPA in which you can see a list of the top anime on the left side of the page, and when you click on one of the titles, the information for that specific anime will show up on the right side of the page. I also added a dropdown menu with different genres including, action, drama, romance, etc. That when you click on one, the anime list will update, showing the animes under that specific genre. You can see the repository here: https://github.com/joeljdv/anime-List.
These past few weeks have been very stressful but also amazing. Looking back a month, I didn’t know anything about coding, and even though I have a lot more to learn and I know that while learning this, I’ll find multiple obstacles; I can’t wait to see how far I can go and how much I will learn.
