How Joan my friend learn new tech: As a beginner, you might find something here

 I taught I should share the conversation I had with Joan a few days ago. The reason is that she just recently graduated from university and did host an app which she had written using ReactJs.

Joan how long did it take you to come up with this web app and she replied- "oh, it took about a month and two weeks". 

Have you ever learnt to work with ReactJS before? 

that was the question that got us all talking about the steps she had taken to approach her learning.

going on from here is Joan telling me her story.

So back in school I have always had this project in mind to do, but then I had knowledge of Javascript Html and CSS not too skilled but I could pull up some one page website without data interaction or the CRUD functionality.

when I graduated I felt the need to really build something that will include CRUD functionality, where I could save data to the database, read and update it. 

the project I had been nurturing in school resurfaced and I thought that will be cool to build. 

i realised I already know the basic JS,HTML and CSS so why not build on it. 

I learnt from few friends on mine that ReactJS seems pretty cool for front end and I should try it. I took up that challenge and began learning react.

I love to read books more than watch the videos on youtube, however sometimes I might just see the videos and pick up something I might have forgotten how it works and I could just search about it and a lot of videos come up. boom! i got an answer already.

I used the material by Robin Wieruch on Reactjs and Google cloud firebase realtime database.

but before getting my hands on his book, I had gone through the basic introductory documentation on reactjs where you have to build some sample project.

I followed through painstainkingly, writing the code as I read the tutorial, following up the samples; it was more like I should grab the whole idea within a short time, but then I had to really pracitse and try to understand what they meant by state management, set state, init state, props and the whole of the life cycle thing. My mental model began to change to see that I could build stuffs by adopting the approach of single source of truth.

After going through each sample from the documentation; I will think of what I can build to show if I understood really well. I could just think of a particular little project that comprises of the knowledge I have gathered from the sample, and then build the project.

I came up with some games like word mat, another version of my tic tac toe and a fruit match game.

I began feeling a bit confidence then I started scratching the surface for my main project which I had always wanted to work on.

I did not want to focus on best practises or clean code, I even had to use bootrasp template to work with; what I really wanted to concentrate on was the integration of CRUD functionality. So while I build I learnt, I figured out working with firebase realtime database, experiemented with it using my project, read some tricks from Robin Wieruch book and implemented what i needed in my project.

Most of the time, I encountered some blockers or errors, I also learnt the skill of asking question on stack overflow. you see, even though you have all of those channels that could help you, it becomes an art to ask the actual questions that will let others help you; googling for solutions is an art. millions of answers can come up, but how do you choose the right ones.

Some questions might be labelled more than others or upvoted but in your use case it might not be the actual solution, you still have to think about all this, try it out and know how to experiment and learn and write down what helped you; sometimes when I try out on my own I still have to go back to stack overflow to let them know about what I did that worked, maybe someone out there could have similar issues like mine and I will be glad to have helped.

I write a lot too, while learning, for me it is a way to reinforce my learning, I write as though i am making some form of note, I sometimes do some imaginary conference, where I can stand up and talk aloud about how cool what am learning is and what I plan to do with it.

While learning, so many ideas come to me and I discuss some with my friends, however most of the time, they are tired of listening to my jargons, it does not stop me, I keep writing learning, talking aloud about it and advancing by writing down what next project to build and strengthen my hands on.

It really takes much of those practise to keep on, but I think what is also more important is to not stop adding features to what you started, don't get overwhelmed by how much more you need to advance your current project with, slow and steady add more features and celebrate the process of growth.

I would not end this with you without mentioning how important it is to sometimes stay away from your system and meet with friends; for me I could go to the park and talk with strangers, I sometimes draw inspiration unconsciously which can help me with some bug i might have been facing for days. 

Take rest and meditate more, drink a lot of water to stay hydrated your brain seem to be doing a lot more work you know. 

So that's it from me. A lot of persons out there could tell about there learning story in a different way than mine. I will like to hear there's too and pick on what ever might work for me.

Hello guys, that is Joan with her learning story. If you feel like sharing yours with me, tat will be really amazing, we can let the world know how you approach learning and what you think in general about the tech community. 

Stay safe.