A common mistake I see a lot of people make (my past and sometimes present self included) is trying to consume too much reading or visual learning material at once without practice.

Instead of 30 TreeHouse videos, take on fewer videos, but put effort into practice immediately upon viewing. The brain likes to fool us into thinking in-the-moment understanding is the same as learning. In reality, learning comes with practice.

Perhaps set a schedule ahead of time, outlining the topic you intend to cover at a particular time along with spaced periods of self-testing (implementing topic XYZ from memory); if you can implement it, then space out the next practice session for that topic with a larger gap, otherwise shrink the time gap till next practice and review the topic. This spaced repetition can take place over the course of a day, a weekend, a week, or a month.

Pick a tool to keep track of your progress, such as a spreadsheet, calendar, or 3x5 index cards. I like the index card method, as it provides tactile feedback to enhance learning just a wee bit more.

I will tell you a little story... The day I got into college, I realized one thing - if you wish to take the easy way out, just do what everyone was doing.

Being in CS, people started doing Competitive coding because of two reasons:

1. Someone told my batchmates that the corporate internships and placements ask CP questions in their exams.
2. One of the best CP coders on a National scale happened to be in our batch.

Note: Competitive Programming is just opposite of development.

I started doing CP but then I soon realized that I don't really like it. It ruined my good coding habits and the very thought of coding without a motive wrecks my will to code. Then I stepped into dev and I never looked back. Life has been difficult for me since but I have made my name in my college because I went upstream, I took the risk of trying something different. I eventually ended up hating my batchmates and openly criticizing CP in every dev workshop I took. I mean, CP is good as a way to spend you weekend sharpening your problem solving skill but as a passion to follow, it is bullshit. If you don't have a purpose to code, you better keep your hands off the keyboard.

Dev has given me the gift of putting my creativity and imagination to the test to create things that I myself can use to make my life easy. I write code as if it were my poem. I spend days refactoring code just because it was not looking good! I have the level of dedication towards the code I write.

So hell yeah! Thumbs up for development....

There's only one thing to keep you motivated.

Real projects.

1. I started to create some websites in Wordpress for my city football club, for some companies.

2. After, I created themes for my Wordpress websites.

3. I created my own CMS in Laravel and I moved all my websites to Laravel.

4. I did not know what else to do.

5. I speaked with web agency and I proposed to build some projects and in exchange they spent some time helping me (Git, Scrum, Angular .......... ).

6. My skills and my motivation grew up and I was ready for the web world :)

Nowadays, in the company where I work all days is a challenge! :)

2009: I graduated from the 'Graphic Design' program in college and my first goal was to be hired as an employee to do in-house design for a company. I wasn't as interested in joining an agency (that did design for clients).

2010: I ended up in design agencies, doing a ton of branding, web design, web development, print design, and advertising.

2011: Eventually a life situation forced my hand out of that job (and city) and I found myself instantly freelancing - trying to get hired to do whatever somebody would hire me to do.

2012-2013: There's a huge market out there for web-related work, and I found over time that 100% of my incoming design clients were all mostly focused on web stuff, so sometime around 2012-2013 I made a conscious choice to limit the work I do to just web development, specifically frontend, and began working on a specialty of 'responsive layout'.

2014-2017: I had been trying to pick up some JavaScript ability as I was developing my frontend skillset, but from 2014-> it became clear to me that an inability to do JavaScript could be a threat to my work. Since 2015 I've 'doubled-down' on my choice of "Design->Web Dev->Frontend->Responsive Layout", and I'm pushing the throttle as far as it can go. I'm focused on learning JavaScript, especially as it relates to HTML and CSS and can be used to support layout and styling.

2018? We'll see where this takes me :D

Everyone starts at the bottom. IMO the best way to learn is as a means-to-an-end. This is a story about my portfolio website which slowly happened over decades. Don't worry about how fast you're going.

1. In order to apply to college I had to submit a portfolio, so I started making one in plain HTML / CSS / JS / images until I was done.
2. I got tired of updating pages so I converted the website into a CMS, a Wordpress site with a custom theme.
3. I wanted more bells-and-whistles on my portfolio. In order to make that happen I learned more JS and PHP.
4. I couldn't find a plugin with the functionality I wanted. I learned how to program a custom Wordpress function from scratch.
5. Eventually my site started to get slow, so I learned how to optimize the website.
6. When that optimization wasn't enough, I learned about various kinds of web hosting (shared vs dedicated vs vps) and their performance impacts.
7. My Wordpress site got hacked so I started to learn all I could about security (TLDR: don't use shared hosting. Set permissions appropriately).
8. In order to attract customers to my own website I started to learn SEO.
9. I got tired of paying for web hosting, so I learned how to host my own server.
10. That lead to learning more about networking, routers, CDNs, VPNs, etc.
11. Eventually I got tired of maintaining the server so I converted to a serverless cloud architecture.
12. The move to a serverless architecture was a chance to abandon Wordpress and learn some other js app frameworks.
13. The move to other JS frameworks meant I had to vastly improve my JS skills.
14. After I got tired of working on websites I branched out to other software (mobile apps, wearables, voice-interaction, desktop apps using electron...)

Attending college helped develop my design skills. After college, somewhere around step 4 or 5, I started working professionally as a web developer. This was based on knowledge acquired during steps 1 through 4. Until that point web development had only been a hobby.