Phew! I thought we'd never get to March, but here we are, all caught up; thank you for your readership.
After finishing the book, I decided to take a course that would introduce me to some fundamental principles of Computer Science that I had skipped over in my haste to learn a programming language. CS50, a short course offered by Harvard University, was an easy choice with all the positive reviews I had seen from various self-taught developers that I had subscribed to on YouTube.
(# The course is freely available on edX and there are no prerequisites.)
The course is structured in Weeks from 0 to 10. Every week, there is a lecture, a few short videos, a lab for coding practice and a problem set. To graduate from the course, you are required to attain a minimum grade of 70% on all the labs & problem sets, but you are free to re-submit them as many times as you'd like. You also need to complete a final project of your choosing just as long as it applies enough of what you have been learning through the course. Overall, it's a very intensive and demanding course but the best part for me is that it's self-paced. I started the course on 16th of March and hope to be done within a month.
(# I will be starting a new series on this blog where in at least 11 articles I'll highlight the most notable aspects of my experience through each week of the program. Please stay tuned for that :-D )
One other thing that I've been up to this month is Codewars. This is a coding practice site where you develop your skills through kata; short coding challenges that test you on fundamentals and problem solving. The complexity of the kata increase as you rise up the ranks from 8 Kyu to 1 Kyu where you can then become a Dan. The ranking terms, borrowed from Japanese martial arts, make you feel like a coding Ninja! It's a great way to pass time, feel good about solving puzzles and get better at coding, all at the same time.
(# You can check out this 7 Kyu warrior (me. Ha!) through the codewars tab on the navigation bar at the top of this page)
That's all for March. See you in Episode 1 of the CS50 series!