I’ve been working on a couple of Udemy courses for the past month or so. I signed up for one in April but I didn’t really dig in for a while. Once I did I decided I needed more so I’m working through both in parallel.

The Bootcamp course is the better of the two. It has more emphasis on the concepts underlying the code, and the increments and exercises are more carefully and sensibly laid out. But the Complete course has some interesting exercises and some additional content areas. Doing the two together is helping reinforce the learning and allowing me to make connections that I might not otherwise get.

When I was in high school there were no computers. The year after I graduated they began offering a course that used Fortran on a university mainframe. In the summer of 1987 I bought myself a Commodore 64 and did a ton of programming in Basic. In 1992 I did a university distance education course in TurboPascal on my first PC.  I first got into building websites in about 1995. I worked from scratch in a text editor and got pretty good with HTML3. I could edit little bits of javascript to do mouseOver effects and could build framesets (ew, remember those?) and nice layouts with tables. But when CSS came into vogue and browsers began getting more powerful, I had moved onto blogging platforms for my day to day web work, and I no longer stayed current on the scripting side. I could hack my way through php installations of bulletin board scripts and got fairly good with WordPress plugins. But there was so much beneath the admin interface that I didn’t have a clue about.

Because I manage the Valhalla Fine Arts website I decided I should get a more robust understanding how it really works. Sooner or later something will break or need a major overhaul, and I’d like to be able to upgrade it with something more customized and up-to-date when the time comes. It is currently based on a root Wordpress installation, with a php-based registration module that was installed by someone else which I don’t have a clue about.

If I’d stayed on the crest of the wave of web development back in the early 2000s I would have been fine. But a decade and half of neglect has left me in a deep hole. I’m not sure how long it will take me to climb out, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m wrapping up my learning about front-end javascript right now. While I don’t find programming easy to learn, I do enjoy the satisfaction of cracking a problem and getting my code to run so it’s good stuff.