💻☕ Starting to walk through the change | Lau

Once I had signed up for the bootcamp…

When I enrolled on the Upgrade Hub bootcamp, I got access to the prework. And that is where this road of transformation really began.

📚 Studying again after so long

When I arrived in Barcelona, freshly graduated, I got my university degree recognised at the UB and did an MBA at EAE. But after that, back in 2013, I never “studied” as such again.

Starting to study code, or at least trying to, was really hard for me. First because sitting down to study is a habit, and I always have something to do:

A meal, a snack, the washing machine, toys, the shopping, weekly menus, leaving things half prepared for the freezer… in short, 🤹a thousand distractions that “stopped” me from sitting down in front of the computer.

🧠 And how do you study this?

The second thing I struggled with was understanding how you study programming.

I do not consider myself that old, but I come from the school of textbooks. My degree was practical, yes, but there was always a book, exercises on paper, a pencil and a rubber. And if you needed to look something up, you searched for it in regulations or standards… all much slower. It was almost better to know things by heart.

Now I sit down in front of Visual Studio Code and the tags autocomplete themselves. And the AI answers all my questions in a second, perfectly.

So I thought:

OK… I do not need to memorise everything… but then, how do you study this?

🔁 Step by step, building the habit

Little by little I built the habit of sitting down for at least a while every day.

I watched the prework videos, replicated them on my own… and without realising it, I finished it long before the bootcamp started.

I started in May, the bootcamp starts in September… but that is what I am like. I like to get ahead.

I feel that 🔍 the more I learn on my own, the less it will cost me later… or at least, that is my theory.

💻 Do I like programming?

Pfff… I love it!

I have always had a creative side. I am passionate about image, fashion, decoration… but I never knew how to channel it.

With this I feel I can ✨create wonderful things, and that I set the limit myself. There are infinite tools, enormous possibilities, and that excites me enormously.

🧱 But it is not a walk in the park…

The further I go, the harder it all looks.

HTML and CSS (once I understood Flexbox and Grid) I can handle in their most basic form.

Build a card? I can already do that 🤣.

And remember: I have not even started the bootcamp yet!

In the prework we saw a small introduction to JavaScript:

Variables, data types, loops, arrays, functions…

And of course, I said: “I am going to learn this properly, so I understand what it is about.”

Spoiler: I did not understand a thing 🤯

⚡ The collision with JavaScript

🧩 Not a single exercise worked out. And that is when I understood all those podcast and video stories where people say:

“We all get frustrated at the beginning. What matters is keeping going.”

Exactly! There I was, completely frustrated.

I kept asking myself:

What am I doing?

Who am I trying to fool?

How is it that so many people code and I do not understand anything?

And at the same time, I love learning it. I picture myself in five years, knowing all of it or most of it, and that is what I focus on.

🛣️ That is the process so far…

I finished the prework.

Now I am watching FreeCodeCamp videos about JavaScript and DOM manipulation, and practising with my ally, AI:

Really basic mini projects with HTML, CSS and JS, one a day.

I will keep updating as I carry on learning.

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