#selfimprovement #coding
Introduction
SELF-IMPROVEMENT /ˈˌself əmˈpro͞ovmənt/ noun
the improvement of one’s knowledge, status, or character by one’s own efforts.
— Oxford English Dictionary.
I took for granted how easy it was to improve my knowledge through formalized schooling from pre-school to college. Taking a step back to reflect, that time was easy since there was an established time to learn, a syllabus, and learning resources.
Luckily for me, I live in an era where a syllabus and learning resources are at the tip of my fingertips. All powered through the internet. In this blog post, I am going to spotlight three online courses that I found extremely useful.
Before I go into the three courses though, there is an important topic to discuss to get the most out of online learning: prioritizing time to learn.
The first part of prioritizing learning is to set up a schedule so that one forms a habit around learning. For me, my scheduling process was to set a completed deadline and split the courses into hour chunks, which I set as a weekly goal. So if I wanted to finish a 40-hour course in 12 weeks, I would make sure to learn 4 hours of content each week. The important part of the goal setting was making the hours realistic and preventing burnout. If I burn out that means I cannot achieve the goal (taking the 40-hour course example, 30 hours completed in 4 weeks still equals zero completion compared to 40 hours in 12 weeks). Understanding myself, if those hours exceeded 6 hours I would adjust the end deadline time.
Now, wait, you might call out that I did that math wrong as 40 divided by 4 is 10 weeks instead of 12. The additional 2 weeks are the added time needed to truly understand and reflect on the online course learnings (taking the 40-hour course example, 40 hours completed in 10 weeks with no understanding still equals zero completion compared to 40 hours of courses plus an additional 8 hours in 12 weeks). Those hours are inclusive in that week as I want to reflect as soon as possible, so my schedule in this example might look like roughly 3 hours and a half of learning and another half hour of reflection weekly.
To make those extra hours of reflection as effective as possible, I center them around a project or passion — aka making the learning my own. This was a long-winded way of saying that in addition to spotlighting the three online courses, I am going to spotlight my understanding of the courses with my own projects.
So let us get into it!
Game Development — GameMakerStudio2
If you are interested in game development, especially games based on 2D space, I recommend learning GameMakerStudio2 as it is very beginner friendly. It is also the cheapest* option on this list to learn, as the courses are on Youtube — aka free.
*The software itself, GameMakerStudio2 is free to use, but if you want to publish the game subscription starts at $7.00/month
I would recommend you start here with a course posted on the Game Maker Studio:
Once you are more knowledgeable about the basics of GameMakerStudio2 and understand GML, I highly recommend watching some videos by Shaun Spalding:
By combining both of those and some more Googling, I was able to make a few small games myself, which I published on itch.io under the username potatato.
Web Development
Outside of YouTube, if you want to invest in a paid online class I have had my best success through Udemy. If you are interested in web development, I highly recommend the course The Complete 2022 Web Development Bootcamp by Dr. Angela Yu. The explanations are clear and accompanied by mini-projects that help you reflect and show that you understand the lessons.
Under What you’ll learn card, the class promises that “after the course you will be able to build ANY website you want.” And it fulfilled that promise for me. I was able to make the learnings my own by building a site that uses Node and MongoDB called Goodmark. The site is a bookmark-keeping site, as I wanted to see bookmarks on different devices without syncing Chrome or having to add any photos.
Android Development
If app development is more your style, then I recommend taking the class The Complete Android 12 & Kotlin Development Masterclass by Denis Panjuta. Similar to Dr. Yu’s class, this course also has clear explanations and projects to put your learnings into practice. The projects vary in different themes as an added bonus.
While I never published it on the Google Play app store, I have a quick write-up of my project Lettgories that I was able to complete due to this course on my portfolio site.
