Learning with Codecademy

Monday, 29th July 2024

I'll probably write more at a later date about why I wanted to start learning to write html, and to build this website. For now, this is a little bit of how I'm learning to build it. I've said before that I know absolutely nothing about how to code. I've never formally studied coding or programming. I didn't study computer science or anything similar at university, and my day job is far removed from this field. Everything I've created on here, I've learnt how to do recently, and am self-taught. Not self-taught in the sense of just making it up from first principles, obviously. And not really in the sense of just looking up how to do this on random internet sites (but there has been some of that).

Primarily, I'm working my way through an online course, and applying the elements that I'm learning on that course to this site, bit by bit. There's a number of sites offering similar courses and resources, but I'm currently using Codecademy. I'd like to say Codecademy was chosen after exhaustive research and comparison, but the truth there was a bit of that, but primarily when I signed up they had a really good value deal on, which meant I paid something less than half the normal price.

The Codecademy course I'm following, and they have plenty to pick from but this one seemed most appropriate, is titled 'Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and GitHub Pages'. So far, (exactly 57% in) it's doing exactly what it says on the tin. It has taken me from creating a plain html text document with essentially nothing more than the equivalent of printing 'Hello World' to this stage so far, where hopefully this site has some colour, some structure, some media content, however basic it all might be.

Generally, the course has been really good at delivering a well-structured learning path where each element follows a logical progression from the next, without too much assumed knowledge on the part of the learner. There's been a couple of points where it's seemed to skip to something that hasn't been entirely clear, but honestly, it might just be that I missed something. Where the odd gap has popped up I've usually been able to work it out, with the help of some judicious Googling.

What it has done so far, is give me a base line to work from so that when I've been searching for how to do something that hasn't been featured in the course yet - like adding this sites favicon - the results of that search have made sense, and I can work out roughly how it all fits together. Overall, it's been an enjoyable experience so far, and albeit without any previous to compare it too, I'd recommend the Codecademy course. The is definitely not an advertorial though! The biggest issue so far has been finding time to fit it in around all of life's other commitments, but I just remember that is is a marathon not a sprint, and it's supposed to be fun!