I completed a course

In the programming world there are so many things to learn and so many courses out there, it's really easy to start one and then never finish it, or buy a ton and never even start them lol. I'm guilty of both.

To prevent this from happening I've been trying to adjust my mindset and one thing that's been helping is to remember that it's totally valid to only do the parts of a course that interest me or the ones I think will benefit me the most, so now to me, completing a course it's not necessarily about going through the entirety of the content (especially for really long courses).

Recently I've completed Just JavaScript by Dan Abramov and Laravel from scratch on Laracasts, taught by Jeffrey Way. The teaching methodology of both is really different and I thought that was interesting. In both cases I did end up going through all of the content because it was really good.

Just JavaScript focuses on improving your mental model and it has a lot of helpful exercises that made me question my knowledge and also allowed me to solve a few misconceptions I had about JavaScript.

I decided to go through the Laravel from scratch course because despite working with Laravel on a daily basis at my job I really wanted to go through the basics to consolidate as much as possible my understanding of the fundamental concepts in the framework (and also because Laravel is pretty cool, lol). The course goes through some more advanced features as well and I thought that was great.

This post is to keep me accountable and to remind myself that going through a course is way easier when you're excited about the content you'll learn. ✌️