Forem: Andrej Acevski

Road To An Internship - Grinding Period [3/3]

Andrej Acevski — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 13:53:36 +0000

Hey folks!

This is the last part of my "Road to an Internship" series, we'll be continue talking about my Grinding Period and the my discovery of new technologies. If you haven't read the previous parts, be sure to check them out:

Grinding Period 💪

As I was finishing the last project I started getting more involved in the developer communities and I met Lazar. Still to this day, he's one of my biggest inspirations - his portfolio website inspired and truly astonished me. I peeked around and I love what he does for programmers and he gave me a lot of tips on what technologies to learn and improve on. It motivated me a lot when I met other hardworking developers who are working through their problems just like me.

Like always, I decided to start a pet project, but this time it was special - I recreated my website Andrej's Tunes using Next.js, Tailwind and I decided to move on from Javascript to Typescript. You can find the source code here. It was quite a productive period and I was very happy with the outcome.

After the positive feedback, I started getting interested in new technologies, some of the frameworks I was experimenting with were:

Then I decided to apply for my internship at CodeChem where there was an Open Day. CodeChem's Open Day is the first event I attended hosted by a programming company but it was genuinely fun. We had a challenge - it was to recreate the game Bejewled. I had a lot of fun and after some time, I secured the long awaited internship.

Final Words 🙌

I hope I managed to motivate some junior developer who're struggling with their code right now. With a lot of love and persistence - you can truly learn any technology, framework or anything - really. On top of that, this was a fun way of me to look on how I've improved these past months and I know that the fire within me won't stop burning anytime soon!

Road To An Internship - The Rough Break [2/3]

Andrej Acevski — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:56:36 +0000

What's up!

We're continuing to the third part of my Road to an Internship series! Last time I was sharing my experiences with API's and the little Discord bot I made which implemented my knowledge of API's. In this part I'll put a highlight on burnouts in programming and the learning curve I had with React.

The Rough Break 🛑

There was a silent phase from me after the last project. I was making websites who never saw the light of day and I was trying to master Node.js more each day! However one day I decided that I was ready for React and so the journey began. It was a long journey, mainly because I couldn't really get the hand of React, there were multiple tries back and fourth but I couldn't understand the main concept of React. So I began to think of a way to overcome React and I decided to do what I used to do on my previous project and how I learned past technologies - a pet project!

One thing you guys might not know about me is that I love music and I'm always around music, it was always a dream of mine to make a website that displays your favorite artists and tracks from Spotify and one night as I was browsing Spotify's API, I had a breakthrough - I decided to make a website to display a user's favorite artists or tracks using React.

Before I continue I want to talk about the minor burnout I had as a programmer. In my case it wasn't that serious but I was so obsessed on becoming a better programmer it killed my motivation. After I made my Discord bot, my motivation went down and now when I look back to it, the main reason was because I was overworked. This is the main reason I struggled with React so much. It was a big learning curve, I must admit but combine that with a slight burnout and it wasn't the most pleasant experience. No matter what's your skill level, we should all take a step back because a break is almost as important as doing our job.

Now, let's continue where we left off! As I was building my website, I started to fall in love with programming more and more. I found a place where I could share my creativity. After a week and a half, I was finally done and it was time to name the project, so Andrej's Tunes was born!
If you visit it, you can see it's an archived Github repository. Why so? In the next chapter I'll talk on how I reworked this website and how you can always improve your code. So what resources did I lean onto when I was making this website? In this specific chapter of my series I'll give you a tip that is used a lot in the real world. The best resource on learning a new technology is the documentation, I was heavily leaning on these following documentations:

What's next? ⚡

In the next chapter I'll talk about how I burst out of my bubble and surrounded myself by amazing programmers who made me take my programming skills to the next level!

Road To An Internship - Moving On [1/3]

Andrej Acevski — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:52:47 +0000

Hey!

This is the second part of my Road To An Internship series, last time we left off right as I was finishing my pet project Omnifoods. It was a simple website with some jQuery mixed with it, however a very important lesson for me to learn! I've had more concrete knowledge on responsiveness.

Moving On 👉

The last project was quite crucial and as a developer, I suggest everyone starting from the very basics. This way you can learn a lot more, even if you feel confident - you can always learn more! However I was far from my final goal. I started reading up on API's and started watching YouTube videos to better improve my knowledge. Some videos that helped me a lot are the following:

Like before, I wanted to start another project, that's the best way for me to learn. I've always wanted to make a Disord bot but not just any Discord bot - I've had in mind to use an API provided by Riot Games for one of their games called Teamfight Tactics. The main goal for this project was to make it display statistics about the username entered, this way I could learn more about HTTP requests and on top of that, I would improve my knowledge with Node.js and Javascript! Here's the API I've used.

After countless of hours, days and a lot of coffees, I finished River Sprite , that was the name I went for when naming the Discord bot. I must admit - it's quite a messy code, I know it's good practice to always have clean code but the knowledge I acquired was priceless. I've decided to use the original code I had, for everyone that is starting and is interested - I hope it motivates you to start off project

In the next chapter... 👾

Next time I'll be talking more about my "Silent Period" - where I focused mostly on React and I'll have a segment on how to avoid burnouts.

Road To An Internship - Starting Off [0/3]

Andrej Acevski — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 15:07:09 +0000

Hey folks!

In December of 2020, I decided to pursue a career as a web developer - in this series of articles I'll be talking about the steps I took. You don't have to follow these exact steps, however I wanted to write about my experience and on top of that I hope to motivate some of you future developers who are currently trying to forge your own path!

I'm far from a full stack web developer, nevertheless I have the mindset of learning new things everyday. Taking that in account, I've accomplished a lot of my goals that I had in mind when I was starting. One of them was securing an internship and working what I love.

Starting Off 🌟

I have to say that I had prior programming knowledge before I started learning with a more serious approach. Where did I start? CSS. I practiced CSS a LOT. It might sound weird, but if you start working with responsive designs, grid designs, flexbox and the rest, you need to know CSS quite well.
I recommend everyone who's a beginner to use Bootstrap's Grid system.
As I was working through the grid system, I was acquiring knowledge in colors. Adobe Color is an amazing tool which assisted me in choosing and picking colors.

My way of learning is making projects - in my opinion that is the best way to learn a skill. I picked up a Udemy course about CSS and created a website called Omnifoods.

It's not the finest websites, however I acquired plenty of knowledge. Some other pretty useful websites if you're starting are
Glyphs, 0to255 and last but not least Octopus.

I'm in love with Octopus since it makes sure you plan out your website prior to doing the programming.

To be continued... 🔜

That's how I started out, in the next article I'll be talking how I learned about API's, Node.js and much more. Thanks for reading!