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June 2020: Put my Notice in to Switch Courses at Uni

I decided that I didn’t want to be learning Robotics Engineering and seeing that I had got 92% in my AI assignment from that year I felt that my real calling (something I could persue with more purpose) was Computer Science so I contacted my university and told them that I wanted to switch courses at the end of the year.

May 2020: I Switched to the React.js Library

After a few days of trying it became apparent that Angular was perhaps a little bit over my head and that perhaps React.js would be an easier “thing” to switch over to. Turns out I was right and React (which is written and maintained by Facebook) is literally now the love of my life (apart from my wife obvs).

May 2020: Tried to learn TypeScript

I knew that simply writing a static HTML site that was served by an API would be quite very 1995 so I knew I needed to look at some of the “live” type of platforms (let’s not get funny over what they are called) like React.js, Vue or Angular. Seeing as it was created by Google I decided that Angular would be the best option so I decided that I was going to be a “MEAN” stack developer (MongoDB, Express, Angular & Node.js).

May 2020: Decided to Start Writing C4RT

After learning the few things I’d learned up to this point I decided that it would in fact be possible to write an app myself and that before tackling the AI problem, decided that I would be able to write the software that hadd been in my head for the last four years. Truth is I had something like this software in place before (around 2016/2017 I think) but it died out because I couldn’t afford to keep paying the developer and this meant that the app just died a death.

April 2020: Learning The Craft

Learn about Node.js, express and how a backend API works. Improved on my coding abilities and generally got my head around the madness that is writing a full stack (front end and back end) application. I began wrote a lot of posts on my blog about this at the time (visit Digital Redneck | Programming if you’d like to see) where I made a colour guessing game and wrote the very essentials that I needed to just crack on and have some fun with JavaScript without the need to constantly be referring to other people’s instruction.

April 2020: Started to Learn JavaScript

Having spent the end of 2019 and the first part of 2020 writing a lot of C programs for the various assignments that were given to me on my uni course (BEng (Hons) – Robotics Engineering) I wanted to build a website that allowed me to upload a CSV file (a file that you would create in Excel) to a website so that I could use that in further calculations (my initial intention was to build an AI calculater interface – a sort of website that can solve problems and predict outcomes based on information you give it).