Introduction

The year 2022 played an important role in my development life. I consider myself a budding programmer at beginning of 2022. Curious to learn a lot of things but don't know how to learn? where to start? The one thing that I want to accomplish is to become a freelancer in the technical development field.

The reason I wanted to become a freelancer is to build an entrepreneurial mindset and freedom of work without having a monthly target. So I desperately researched what is the most wanted skill in tech.

What did I learn?

As a result of my research, I decided to study and master full-stack web development. I also found out that Data structures and Algorithms are very important.

At first, I followed several roadmaps provided by my academics and teaching staff that I couldn't see a market need for. So I asked my "GOOGLE" buddy what I should study. Then I discovered that I needed to learn a programming language, data structures and algorithms, development, and so on.

Data structures and algorithms are shared by all programming languages, thus this is not an issue. But I know that for a programming language, I should choose one that is extensively used and generally known. My university teaches data structures and algorithms using the C programming language. So picking that will also assist me academically. At this point, I started with C, Data structures and Algorithms, and Web Development.

How did I learn?

I decided to pursue studies in web development since I was inclined to do so beforehand. Have studied the markup languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I've always had a soft spot for JavaScript, so I decided to dive headfirst into learning MERN stack web development. My first full-stack project was A WATCH-SELLING E-COMMERCE SITE took me around 8–9 months to grasp the basics. So basically I studied using youtube tutorials and building projects.

Improvements

Talking about improvements I had a lot of exposure to full-stack web development and Data structures and algorithms. I wish I should have started my web development journey long before. But it's okay, now I can call myself an intermediate full-stack web developer.

Regrets

In the beginning, I came to this conclusion after reading a few articles, which basically said that web development does not need a deep understanding of data structures and algorithms. But I couldn't have been more incorrect. Because of what I learned about algorithms and data structures, I had to reevaluate my whole approach to programming. As seen by my demonstration, it is possible to improve performance across the board and produce more readable code.

I have a long way to go in terms of mastering data structures, algorithms, and problem-solving techniques.