My Journey into Web Development
Ever wondered how it feels to have found your passion? Well, I felt it back in September 2017 when I took the courage to know what Web Development really is! In my high school, I got to know a bit about HTML syntax —
<p> Hello World </p>There was nothing intriguing about that semantic or so it seemed back then. Time went by as college-life starts but the academic curriculum already got me into boredom so I decided to try out new things; It was during this period of discovery that I stumbled upon sites like Udacity, Udemy, freeCodeCamp, Codecademy, SoloLearn, etc. but more importantly that feeling when I built my first webpage on October 2017! It felt so good to have made something that I can share with the rest of the world. It was part of freeCodeCamp’s front-end project.
Google India Challenge Scholarship
Back in December 2017, I got to know about this scholarship and without any second thought I applied for it; I made a couple of projects by then and had a basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! Then I got this email stating I’ve been selected for phase 1 of the scholarship program, successfully clearing which would grant me Udacity’s Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program free of cost!
The Journey with an awesome Community
Starting off with this community on 14th February 2018 was full of irony as most of my friends were busy celebrating Valentine’s Day while I was trying to propose Web Development! I already finished most of the lessons within the first week of this program and also had an awesome time getting to know other people on the Slack’s workspace and Udacity’s discussion forum!
“The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday.” — Steve Maraboli
I had given up any preconceived notion of front-end and wanted to start fresh which led a stronger foundation this time around! I was really naive, in terms of technology stack or frameworks used in the industry, when I joined the program but here I am just a week before the end of this program with a clear understanding of how the front-end works, design schemes, color palettes, frameworks and especially Git & GitHub!
The best things that happened to me during this period of time —
- Selected as Moderator for the #west_bengal Slack channel
- Selected as Co-Moderator for one of the collaborative projects i.e. TaskMaster
The best thing about this Scholarship —
- Community
I’ve got tons of help from my peers who provide me great advice which really helped me in shaping my vision for the coming days! This 3 months taught me that learning can be fun if one has will and ambition to do it! Being engaged with so many people and seeing them active also provided me motivation to remain so! Some of us bonded so well that we would still be in contact with each other even after this scholarship program ends; I will never ever forget about this last 3 months of my life!
If I were to summarize the whole experience in a single sentence I would say —
“I joined this program thinking of only becoming a web developer but it also helped me in developing myself!”
Thank You Google & Udacity for giving me this splendid Opportunity
