My background

Hello, I'm Danny. Before going into my recent learning activities, let me talk about my programming background.

I recently graduated from my secondary school. When I was in S5, I entered a computer competition. I used my simple HTML language knowledge to finish my work and luckily, I got Certificate of Merit. Basically, I had little programming knowledge and only learnt some HTML logic from the competition.

How my programmer journey began

I met my mentor Jack back in 2016. He is a software engineer. He gave some important opinions to improve my first website. Back then, I had two mobile apps ideas that were about getting closer with family and friends. Jack gave me lots of inspirations on how to make them better.

When I graduated from my secondary school in June, I want to go deeper and learn more programming full time. Jack gave me his friend's contact and that's how I connect with Eddie. Jack said that I can learn programming from Eddie this summer, so out of a sudden, I am now learning in F5 Works office.

Start with basic web online courses

At the beginning, Eddie sent me some online courses in order for me to know what is needed to build a website.

When I first started taking these online courses, I had quite some difficulties following them because some coding tools were new to me. For example, jQuery and git were one of the most difficult topics. But I knew that jQuery could be picked up easily.

Build my static personal profile website

After I finished those basic courses, Eddie said that I could build my own website using Bootstrap. So I started building my website using Bootstrap.

Bootstrap is a useful tool to build website. Bootstrap is a comprehensive frontend framework, so what I need to do is to change some coding (based on what I learnt in other courses) to build my own style website.

Also, I sometimes found some BUGs in my website. Of course, I have to fix them before completion.

When I finished my website, I felt sense of success because I think that my website would attract my schoolmates. Why? because I would upload some photos of school daily to my website.

Tic Tac Toe

After that, I had to start my next project which is a tic-tac-toe JavaScript game. Eddie told me that I can use Trello to plan some tasks in advance to build the game, then I can follow and build exactly what I want.

I had no idea when I started it. I started by searching details of tic-tac-toe game.

First I created a background of tic-tac-toe game. Also, I used my knowledge of online courses (e.g. :border-bottom-style) to create the gameboard. After I finished all the CSS of the gameboard, then I started the JavaScript part.

When I started writing coding of tic-tac-toe game, I felt helpless because I didn't know how to start it ... So I go to Google and search more about JS function. After I found some useful JS function, I built the game step by step.

Refactoring my Tic Tac Toe

Two weeks later, I finished tic-tac-toe game logic but there were lots of repeated code and badly named variables. So Eddie taught me how to cut back some repeat coding and changed some variable names in order to make it easier-to-understand for future, perhaps when I see it or other programmers see it.

My feeling so far

Learning in F5 Works office is one of the most important parts of my learning experience. Also, they are very nice and they are willing to teach me and give some important opinions to improve my projects. My mentor Jack told me that Hong Kong have few good software engineers, I just met even fewer of them who wants to teach.