Developing my (Beginner) Coder Skills

Besides my health journey, I've decided to try something new to better myself: learning how to code. I'm starting with HTML and CSS. I attempted learning it back around 2012, but gave up about halfway through the book I bought. Then again, with the same book, tried around 2017 or so. Now I'm at it again.

HTML isn't terribly difficult, as most of it, I'm learning to memorize as I go, since everything you make basically has the same things in it. CSS is something I want to memorize some of, but I think as long as I know where to look when I have questions about a problem I have, or am trying to build something, I'll be good.

How I feel after finally understanding something I've been stuck on.

Where it gets tricky is, what to learn next. I've been hearing to learn JavaScript next, then on to other programming languages (the one I hear most). But others say I should learn React, Node, C++, etc. So I'm going to focus on learning HTML/CSS for now, then move on to what the majority says.

Learning new things is scary, but as I tell my daughter all the time: No one grows up knowing everything. You just have to go into something knowing you're not going to know it, and learn what you can.

One of my first goals once I learn what I need to is to create my blog from scratch instead of using a template. If you have any insight into what to do after HTML/CSS, let me know in the comments.

Building my pen/paper collection

Part of the reason I wanted to start my blog back up was because other than the journal I'm writing for my daughter, I don't really write a lot. Back in the day, I was told I had a narrative writing style. I really don't know what that means, but looking back on it, I think that person was just trying to call me a personal blogger. One of the things I want to get out to the masses is my love of pens & paper.

I no longer have close to 100 pens, and a huge pile of notebooks, but over the past couple of weeks, I've started collecting again. Take a look:

What I have here is (all are black or blue):

Pentel EnerGel 0.5 & 0.3

Pilot Precise V5

TUL 'Fine'

Pilot G2 0.38

Three editions of Field Notes singles

Two 'Stone Paper' notebooks

Cambridge spiral notebook

Mint Green top-spiral notebook

The Pentel EnerGel and Pilot Precise pens have been my go to for the longest time. The G2, I only have because I saw the 0.38 size in Wal-Mart. They're good pens, but on certain papers, I just can't use it. The EnerGel and Pilot Precise pens just write great on everything.

You can look forward to many posts about future acquisitions (some coming real soon).