Freecodecamp - The Story of a Moderate Achievement

by Andy T

Reading time: 3 min

The title of this post says “a moderate achievement” and in reality it is, but I am still proud of the topic that I’m about to talk about.

I mentioned in one of my first posts on this blog that I started using freeCodeCamp many years ago as one of my first forays into learning front end development. At the time HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I was dedicated for a number of month and almost completed the front end certificate, which consisted of about 300 hours of study. However I dropped off about 90% of the way through because I moved onto learning other things - Python (yay!) and WordPress (slightly less yay!).

A few months ago, after starting this blog and getting back into front end development I thought about going back and completing the certificate that I had left all those years ago. Imagine my surprise when I logged back on and found that the one 300 hour course that I left had now been separated into three 300 hour courses! Fortunately it wasn’t all new material, so the time I had spent building the core skills and completing activities was saved as the activities were split into the three new curricula. Since then I’ve been logging on semi-regularly and tackling a few challenges from time to time, slowly making progress.

Then I had a bit of an epiphany a few weeks ago. I listened to a video produced by the creators of a Python learning platform that I’m a member of, PyBites about imposter syndrome that was really motivating. I’ve had a few back and forth messages with the creators of the video and we jumped on a call a few days later. That was really inspirational and spurred me on to make some more progress on my programming journey.

Since then I’ve been going mad trying to code as much and as often as I can. I’ve managed to complete the remaining activities to two of the freeCodeCamp certificates. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, but it has taken a decent amount of effort and I’m pretty proud of myself as there has been quite a lot of work gone into achieving these certificates.

I really do think that the FCC program is a great place for people wanting to get into web development. Their bite sizes lessons clearly explain the topics at hand and they manage to get the balance between leading without hand-holding too much and there is rarely a time that help isn’t close at hand, if necessary.

With that being said, please allow me a moment of indulgence as I proudly display the certificates that I completed through freeCodeCamp.

Firstly the Responsive Web Design Certificate:

And now the Algorithms and JavaScript certificate:

I didn’t complete them on the same day, there were a few days in between before I realized that I had to update my details and actually claim the certificates, which is what happened this past Saturday.

I’m still going ahead with my study on freeCodeCamp as I would like to complete the Front End Libraries certificate in the coming weeks. I’m learning more and more about React at the moment, which I hope will help me to develop more websites in future as I move towards Gatsby and maybe even NextJS. Who knows what the future will bring, I’ve changed my mind and changed what I want to study several times since I started writing this blog several months ago, so things could change again.

Photo by Guille Álvarez