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Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 PointsUnfinished Courses
Up to now, I've only ever failed to finish one course that I've started here on Treehouse.
That was the AngularJS course, the guest course that came before Huston's Angular Basics.
The course I'm currently doing on the side of the Wordpress Development track is the HTML Jekyll course.
I've kind of "semi" completed the course in that I've generated a site but there seems to be too many glitches with it for me to know how to handle. Of course I can fix that by looking at the documentation and going back through the courses but I just think I lack the motivation. I'm not sure that I need to learn Jekyll. Jekyll is kind of like a mini version of Wordpress. I'm all my learning potential that I have into Wordpress and I still need to go back through some things there when I've finished the track.
Am I giving up too easily? Probably. But as I say I just don't think I have enough motivation to finish it. So I'm probably not going to. I'm going to "drop out" as it were.
I really want to get into the new Databases courses now as I think this goes hand in hand with Wordpress and Dynamic websites. Wordpress is my real focus at the moment.
Anyway, that's a bit of background. My main question is, is anyone else in a similar situation to me? How many courses do you have out there that you haven't finished and in all likelihood my not?
1 Answer
Tobias Helmrich
31,602 PointsHey Jonathan,
firstly I have to say that I was going to tackle the Jekyll course soon as I was trying to get a bit into static site generators so now I'm a bit worried, haha.
But I know that situation as well. Sometimes I'm starting a course but after some time I either notice that it's just not for me or that I just don't need this at the moment. So I'm not "dropping out" of this course forever but I'm just stopping that course for the moment but keep it in mind and eventually come back when I feel that it could be useful. At the moment I have maybe about 2 or 3 courses that I'm "pausing". I also have to admit that I've finished a few courses just for the sake of "having them done" which probably wasn't a good idea.
I think that if you don't have an immediate use case for something it's often not worth learning it at this point because when you can't use what you've learned it will be hard to keep that. Like you said with Jekyll, if you just feel that you don't need it, why should you stick with it? The world of developing is too full of interesting and useful languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. to stick with something you don't actually need.
You have to keep in mind that not every language/framework/... is made for everybody and that's totally fine. If there are technologies you're passionate about go and pursue them instead of learning something you don't really need or care about! :)
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 PointsJonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 PointsHi Tobias,
I don't mean to talk down on Jekyll in my post. I'm sure it's a perfectly good skill to have for a web developer. I think what goes against the course slightly is that Jekyll has updated a couple of times since the course came out so I find it tricky to keep up. By all means check out Jekyll and see if you like it.
Otherwise thanks for your feedback on pausing or dropping courses. I think it's just the completist in my that doesn't like having courses on there that could be left for ages. That Angular course completeely defeated me though :)
Tobias Helmrich
31,602 PointsTobias Helmrich
31,602 PointsAbsolutely, I know what you mean! :) I recently had some problems in the "Build a Simple Dynamic Site with Node.js" course as well because some things were slightly different already. It can be frustrating to compare the new documentation to the code in the course just to find the outdated part. I guess it's sometimes hard to keep all the courses up-to-date, especially in the rapidly moving world of JavaScript.