Dealing with discouragement

Hey dude i am on a community on discord that helps people like you. You can chat in real time with other developers https://discord.gg/bSc6PcY

i invite you to find the answers for your questions

I think it's about perspective more than anything else. For me those feelings can happen in one full work day. It's kinda the nature of the game. You feel like crap because you can't figure out some logic, and when you do it's like the top of the world, then something else happens and your back down again. Programming is hard, no question about that. Most of the people employed today have been doing this since they were 16, and now they are 28-35. That's a lot of time to mess up and recognize patterns and syntax.

You Just have to code everyday. It's as simple as that. It's a language and if you don't use it, you'll loose it. I find the hardest thing for people starting out is what to build, they have a lot of great ideas but Are way too advanced for them. My suggestion is to find a project that starts with what you are comfortable doing then expand it to things you are not comfortable doing. Are you a frontend dev, what experiences do you have with SVG animations? How is your JS skills? Are you in a place that has meet ups for Jr. Dev's? theres a lot you can do and I've aded some links below. I think They put some good perspective on things, especially why learning to cod is so damn hard. getting a job is another great blog that gives a solid outline for getting a job, and codrops is one of the best resources for frontend. Great tutorials from the best devs around.

It's not going to be easy, but if you like it and want it. Stick with it!

why learning to code is so damn hard

getting a job as a front end dev

codrops

Here is a example that happened to me last week. I started work in the morning as usual and all of my code for my grids wasn't working, My sass was compiling with errors that were like @media is not valid, and so forth. I was like WTF is going on here. I thought I must of done something stupid. So I reviewed everything and found out that my Bourbon neat updated and I had no idea So I fixed that. These are the situations you will come faced with when learning.

I appreciate the responses, guys, and I apologize for the delay in responding.

@Jonathan Got signed up on the Discord group-thanks for the invite. It'll be nice to be able to chat with other devs.

@Jacob Thanks for the links-I'll definitely check them out. I didn't expect front end dev work and coding to be easy, but I was hoping to be in a better state after over a year of work. I do need to rededicate myself to coding every day. However, the main issue is the difficulty finding an entry level position. It seems like the words 'expert' and 'senior' accompany every front end job listing, along with a minimum of 3 years experience to even be considered. I really don't want to have to spend the next 2 years honing and refining my skills before getting a job and having access to a mentor.

JS is a bit of a pain for me, but I've spent most of my time focused on computers and networking (A+, Network+) rather than coding. I backed off JS a bit and started an online Introduction to Programming class from MIT Open Courseware, which has really helped in laying the foundation to understand the elements of coding common to all languages.