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New year, new journey

If anybody here knows me (personally or virtually) then there’s no point in reminding that I’m in the customer support business. I always liked to help others and this is what drives me to do my job every day. It might sound a bit cheesy but well, this is it, there’s nothing to hide.

Also, I always liked to learn new things, whether it’s about my job (read a book about working with clients or to improve the writing skills) or about my skills. One of the last few things that I learned lately is riding a motorcycle (it’s winter season right now so no fun for now). Also, I recently read a book called The productivity habit that I would recommend. I know there’s room to improve this side (at least for me).

What else?

The most recent thing that I’m trying to learn about in my spare time is JavaScript. I worked with WordPress for around five years now and I’m pretty sure that I won’t stop working with it anytime soon. In order to stay up-to-date and make sure that I can work with WordPress in the long run, I decided that it’s time to allocate some time to learn JavaScript. As the founder of WordPress said, it’s time to “Learn JavaScript, deeply.“. Contrarily to what everybody else might think, my guess is that this won’t be mandatory only for developers. I mean yes, right now it’s not enough to know only PHP anymore in order to work with WordPress. However, even from the position of being a support person is important to identify a user’s problem as fast as possible. Well, sometimes, a simple investigation might be worth a lot in the eyes of the customer when you’ll be able to fix the problem he has just by pointing the place that’s causing the issue he has.

I know that this advice (about learning JavaScript) was launched in 2016 but I think that it’s still not too late to start. This is the time when everything changes in the WordPress ecosystem, things are moving to a new editor, a new way of doing things… basically a new WordPress (well not entirely, mostly improved).

Why all this story?

I wanted to share how did I start learning JavaScript. It all began with a mail from Codecademy about some enrollment offer. I was curious about what else I can find on their website. They had a 30-hours JavaScript course and challenged me to work at least half-an-hour a day on it (why just 30 minutes and not more? Maybe I’ll write another article about this). However, I managed to finish it in about two weeks (along with my full-time job). The next step is to go through some more courses (some ReactJS too) and read the books from the You Don’t Know JS series.

I know that right now things are pretty simple when it comes to support: a little bit of CSS, maybe a line of PHP to change the query and everything’s fine. However, things are changing, Gutenberg is here, and even understanding just the basics of how everything works will definitely be very helpful.

This is it for now. If anybody has some other resources that might be helpful for learning JavaScript, leave a message and I’ll definitely have a look. Also, I would love to hear some other stories about learning journeys.

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