Dancer to Dev - Journey of a self taught developer

  Focus this week: This week has been a busy one down to the arrival of our new puppy "Bailey" who has been doing his best to distract me all week and definitely succeeding. So trying to self study around him has been a bit challenging as anyone who has had a new puppy will know. It has been really fun though and he has encouraged me to take regular breaks, if not a little too many, but I did manage to get a project done. After my focus last week was on WordPress and becoming familiar with it, I decided to focus this week on doing a WordPress project. I thought a great start would be to build a blog, specifically this one as I have wanted a new and updated feel to it, plus a bit more freedom with the layout and writing CSS. Check it out here: http://dancer2dev.com/ From now on I will be blogging from  dancer2dev.com  and keep posting updates on my learning journey from a dancer to developer, as I'm definitely ready for a change.  Stay motivated: “When in doubt, choose cha

Focus this week: This week has been a slight detour from my current learning journey after being asked by a few friends and family about creating a website for them. So, I have been looking into WordPress, an open-source content management system that is used by many to create websites. Now you don't have to write any code for it which is great for those not interested in learning to code. However, there are developers who use PHP to create custom plugins and themes, so it caters for everyone dependent on how deeply you want to delve into it. I spent the week looking into the basics as I didn't have any prior knowledge other than knowing WordPress built websites. So far, it seems pretty self explanatory when creating content and there are also advanced settings where knowledge of HTML and CSS comes into play. Coding knowledge is also useful if something isn't perhaps working how you may expect it to as you can just jump into the code editor and debug the issues there.   I h

                                         Focus this week: This week after spending time on practice questions I decided to place my focus on recursion. Recursion is something that has come up a few times when pair programming with my boyfriend. He is a senior software developer and is a big fan of it, I on the other hand was not as convinced. A function calling itself? now that's confusing, however, it did get my attention. So I decided to delve deeper, reading and watching various software engineers' blogs and explanations to try and help me get a better grasp on the concept. My boyfriend and I have also been putting recursion into practice, having a go at some common problems that lend themselves to a recursive solution and working through them. One of these was inverting a binary tree, which after looking at data structures last week at least meant I knew what this would visually look like. As we worked through the problem before I knew it my function was calling itself, usi

                                Focus this week: This week was a bit of a tough one as I found it hard motivating myself to study. Lack of motivation is a common problem for so many, especially with the current situation. More people have found themselves in an unfamiliar state, whether it be working or studying from home, the lack of routine and numerous distractions, can make getting things done rather challenging.  As I mentioned last week making something a habit is key and I'm still finding the balance. In fact this blog has really helped with my own motivation, as it creates a goal to achieve each week and focuses my study. So with that being said, I have tried drawing out a more detailed plan this week, mixing a continuation of algorithms and data structures, practicing technical questions and building websites. As I had a few areas to focus on I split them into what I wanted to achieve in the morning of a given day and what to focus on in the afternoon. The benefit of this