Building My First Small Projects

Moving Beyond Tutorials

I've been following tutorials for weeks, but I realized I wasn't really learning until I started building things on my own. So I decided to create some small projects from scratch.

What I Built

I made a simple todo app and a basic calculator. Nothing fancy, but they work! The todo app taught me about event listeners, local storage, and manipulating the DOM. The calculator was good practice for handling user input and performing calculations.

What I Learned

Building these projects revealed gaps in my knowledge I didn't know existed. I had to Google a lot, but that's okay. The process of solving problems is teaching me more than just following along with tutorials.

Struggles

I spent way too long trying to figure out why my event listeners weren't working, only to realize I was trying to add them before the DOM elements existed. Classic mistake, but now I understand the importance of DOMContentLoaded.

Next Phase

I want to learn about async JavaScript and APIs. I see people talking about fetch() and promises everywhere, and I need to understand what that's all about.