It's time to start the year off with a bang! I've had lots of fun doing the #100DaysOfCode challenge last year, and I had an absolute blast doing several online courses and building their major course projects with my own personal take, from adding minor improvements and additional features to adding another layer to the tech stack used in the project. That's why I'm starting this year off with a fresh new round of #100DaysOfCode, with more focus on doing the things I really like and satisfying my curiosity on the various technologies I encounter in my career.
Over this past month I've been taking a much-needed break from coding assembling a new curriculum of online courses I'll be taking this year, focusing mainly on courses with a ton of exercises and projects that I can maybe tweak to my liking as I learn more stuff over the course of this year.
#100DaysOfCode Round 1: Mad Science
This round is an improvement of sorts refining the ideas from the previous round I completed last year, improving the parts I really liked about last round, and developing a streamlined curriculum of online courses mostly about various topics I'm curious about (hence "Mad Science"), and other topics that reinforce the skills relevant to my career.
My main task for this round remains the same: Complete as many of these courses as I can, making steady progress each day for the next 100 days. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Getting the 100% Complete status on the course, and thus acquiring the Certificate of Completion
- Completing the course projects
Why Online Courses?
Honestly? Because it's fun! After doing a bunch of online courses last year, it tuned out to be something I very much enjoy. As such, I want to take the parts I liked about last round, refine these ideas to make a curriculum of online courses, and pretty much just continue doing what I love and make lots of progress this year!
For this round, I've chosen exercise-driven courses for topics I don't know much about (or want to take a deeper dive in). To help myself come up with project ideas, something that I admittedly lack the skill (or creativity?) to do, I've also picked a bunch of project-based courses with some interesting and comprehensive projects that I can tweak to my liking as I learn more throughout this round.
The Starting Lineup
I've organized my courses into two distinct categories. The first category consists of courses where I plan to follow along with the course content from start to finish. These will typically be the courses that I'll be adding to my Main Curriculum for this round. The second category consists of courses about topics I've already done, or courses that have plenty of comprehensive projects about various topics. For these courses, I'll be taking the major course projects and use those as supplementary resources/extra credit material for my Main Curriculum courses, ideally incorporating the things I learn from the Main Curriculum courses to add extra features and/or provide an alternate implementation for these course projects.
Here is the first batch of courses I plan on doing for this round:
1. Epic React
Starting the year off strong with this course! I'm really excited about the workshop format of this course, which is unlike any other video-based course I've seen so far.
Epic React also has a Typescript-based next branch for most of its workshops, and I do plan on checking those out and learn Typescript as I go along with the course.
Supplemental Resources
💯 Extra Credit
-
freeCodeCamp - Front End Development Libraries Projects
- Build a Markdown Previewer
- Build a Drum Machine
2. CSS for Javascript Developers
This is another course with a somewhat different format to what I'm used to with Udemy courses. Combined with a solid course content, I have high hopes that this course will help me get even better with CSS!
Supplemental Resources
- UI Foundations
- ZTM Academy Workshop: Designer to Developer Handoff ➡ Design File to Code
- The Ultimate JavaScript Animation Course
💯 Extra Credit
-
freeCodeCamp: Responsive Web Design Projects
- Build a Technical Documentation Page
- Build a Personal Portfolio Page
3. Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization
After I finished the D3 section of The Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp last year, I've always been intrigued by data visualization with D3. With this course, I hope to satisfy that curiosity about D3 and build some beautiful data visualization projects. Bonus points if I can combine React with D3 to make the visualizations interactive as well!
Supplemental Resources
💯 Extra Credit
- Redo projects using React + D3
4. Major Project - TBA
I've got plans to redo a past E-commerce project into the latest version of the frameworks/libraries I used the first time around. More details soon!
Supplemental Resources
There's a lot more courses that I want to take other than the ones listed above, and for now I've organized them into Specializations, Electives, and other courses to take project ideas from. My plan is to do this first batch of courses first, then add these other courses into the Main Curriculum and see where my curiosity takes me!
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