Coding projects to learn

Let me take you back to when I was in my first year of college at the age of 17. I was studying A level maths and at the time I didn't have a working calculator. There were a lot of hard sums and calculations that would require one but I just didn't own a working one, so I was forced to do a lot of the calculations either on paper or in my head. I got really good at it. I found myself able to do those calculations really quickly in my head. I was kind of surprised at my ability. Then I got a calculator and I stopped doing calculations in my head. Now, over a decade later, I no longer am as good at it.

What is the point of this story? It's essentially to showcase how when it comes to your brain, if you don't use it, you lose it. But if you do use it, you can be surprised by how well your brain can function.

In these days of AI, I don't want to be solely reliant on it to build code. It has it's uses, sure, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to still be able to build code without using it. So how do you learn code? When I was younger one of my go to methods was to watch and follow tutorials on YouTube. Getting regular emails from Free Code Camp that had long tutorial videos was great, and the Net Ninja YouTube channel is a brilliant place to start. But I often feel that true learning doesn't really happen and it certainly doesn't prepare you for the professional world. In an actual workplace you spend a lot of time trying to investigate bugs and issues, and coming up with solutions. Following a tutorial doesn't give you that experience of banging your head against the desk for hours trying to solve some issue. So I did something different.

I decided I was going to go to Claude AI and ask for a series of project ideas for JavaScript (the language I wanted to practise) that would get progressively harder, and then I would create those projects. The only references I allowed myself to use was the MDN docs, W3Schools and javascript.info. Essentially, just references to the code rather than anything that could explain how to do the project as a whole.

As I worked through these I got progressively more familiar with JavaScript as whole. It started by having me build a counter app that would count and display button clicks, and then also had me build:

• A quiz app
• A character counter
• A countdown timer
• A to-do list
• A weather app (connected to a weather API)
• A localStorage note app (where data persists)

Through working on these I learnt new aspects of JavaScript I was unfamiliar with and was reminded of other aspects I had already had experience with. The countdown timer in particular helped me learn more about how Date variable types worked in JavaScript and how they can be manipulated.

If you're wanting to learn a new language or practise an old one, this is certainly a method worth trying. It forces you to actually use your brain to solve problems, to try new things, to fail and learn from those failures.