Contrary to the gif above in the header, I'm not exasperated. I like the guy from Naruto and it seemed like cool gif so yeah. Now to the meatier stuff.

2021 is going pretty well for me in regards to dev stuff and I wanted to document the progress that I've made so far. I'm gonna be talking about Q1 - Jan to March.

Also, this article was inspired by Black Unicorn. Thanks for sharing your progress as well.

Q1 has been filled with react, react and more react. Honestly, it was so unprecedented. Why? I'd explain: Around November last year, I decided to finally start Javascript. Y'know cause it's the next fundamental after ol' HTML and CSS.

My plan was simple: learn as much as I can, build projects with the three stack and then finally start a framework. I tend to absorb a lot of advice from software engineers on twitter and one thing I had got prior to starting out my dev journey in August was:

NAIL DOWN THE FUNDAMENTALS.

Nothing less would be enough.

Therefore, as the perfectionist that I am, I went full throttle, at least, that was supposed to be the plan.

Fast forward to January. I started a new mentorship programme -- Blackvalley, check them out -- and my mentor decided that, considering my goals for the year -- which is to get into spotify internship programme -- it'd be best for me to start react, in January. what?? lol, I wasn't ready for that. I wanted to know JS and I had barely spent three months with it. To make matters worse, I hadn't built any projects yet, sigh. It wasn't looking quite well.

Fast fast forward to March and wow, I'm loving it lol. so what changed? or better what didn't change? -- I'd say a lot definitely happened but that is for another article.

One thing I realized was that React helps you try out all the JS syntax you've been reading about, at least that was what happened to me. Richard -- the best mentor in the world -- saved my ass a couple of times when I got stuck with both components and props. I definitely still need to up my JS game but that hasn't stopped me from enjoying and exploring all that react has to offer. It's a cool library and JSX is the bomb.

Just see this

function App(){
    return (
         <div className="container">
           <Header/>
           <Main/>
           <Footer/>
         </div>
         )
}

That's a simplification but it's pretty exciting once you use it in real projects.

So yeah, Q1 has mostly been filled with React; I also read about atomic design by Brad Frost which was a delight. Thinking in components changes literally, everything. Also, CSS is still sick. It will never cease to amaze me especially what people can create with it. Like HOW do they do it? wow!

I also learned a lot about accessibility -- a11y -- but I feel that deserves a special blog post. It's a very important part of web dev to me.

All that's left now is to keep moving forward. I have plans to work with Web Apis and authentication. Some other things I definitely would be working on in Q2 are:

• Aws Amplify
• Firebase
• Node
• Tailwind -- really excited about this
• and Gatsby -- gotta build that portfolio.

It's been an exciting Q1 and I'm really looking forward to Q2. Before I go, I'd just like to appreciate all the wonderful folks who've helped out: Richard, Leke, Charles, Ugonna. Thank you for all that you've done and the push you've given me. There definitely, is still more to come.

Thanks for reading.