About me
Name
Rowdy VerbeekDate of Birth
08-05-1983Place of Birth
Rotterdam
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Introduction
Hi my name is Rowdy and my age is 41. I'm a coding enthusiast with three years of experience. Everything on this website was coded by me, without using pre-styled components or templates. I enjoy reading and writing code. All the JavaScript code on this site was written by me with guidance from official documentation.
Brief History
I've always been a creative and curious person. As a child, I spent a lot of time drawing, crafting, and writing. I made membership cards for imaginary libraries and Super Mario Club member cards for my classmates. Back then, I didn’t have a computer, so everything I designed was handmade and I had beautiful handwriting. As I got older, I got my first personal computer. I’ll never forget it—it was a Compaq Presario with a 333Mhz processor. Proudly, I told my computer science teacher in middle school that I had a '333'. It was the fastest processor at the time, and he was amazed! I began learning about computers, quickly becoming familiar with the components and what they did. I even replaced the video card and installed a DVD player that could also write DVDs.
Curiosity
How did this beautiful menu pop up when I put the DVD in the player? How did all the titles appear in the menu, and when I clicked on one, an article loaded in another section? My curiosity led me to dig into the hidden files and folders, where I discovered that the menu was simply a text document with code. I downloaded all the files from the DVD to my computer, started changing values, and watched the menu change.
Path of Life
I’ve held many different jobs, but I never experienced that feeling of “this is what I can do for the rest of my life.” I made some mistakes along the way, but hey, we’re all here to learn, right? In the meantime, I spent a lot of my free time behind the computer, writing stories and rhymes, learning 3D modeling with Sketchup and V-RAY, and building computers.
Coding
About 1812 days ago, I decided to take learning webdevelopment seriously and really focus on learning. I started with HTML5 and CSS3, which I picked up fairly quickly. However, building a full-blown website from scratch was an entirely different challenge. To manage the complexity, I decided to focus on frontend web-development first. Along the way, my interests began to shift towards software development and backend development as well. I also discovered a interest for working with data and databases.
JS
JavaScript is kind of… well, I found it challenging to learn. In the beginning, I avoided it because I didn’t have the confidence that I could ever wrap my head around it. I learn quickly by visualizing things, but with JavaScript, I struggled to visualize it. Basic variable = assignments or creating simple [arrays] and {objects} weren’t too hard. However, writing pure functions, understanding asyncchronous code, ((callbacks) = > { }) , promises.then( ), and closures proved to be much more difficult[100].
Struggle
The struggle was real. Many times, I left JavaScript behind and started learning Ruby instead. I even got my feet wet with Ruby on Rails. Using the Rails CLI, I could set up a basic frontend and backend. This helped me understand the structure of a full-stack app and the MVC pattern. But I didn’t want to rely on setting up a form and database with a few commands—I wanted a deeper understanding of how everything worked.
Consistency is Key
During difficult periods while learning the basics, it really helped me to hear stories from other people about how they dealt with challenges, insecurity, and the feeling of being stuck while learning development. I’m grateful to those amazing people who shared their stories and helped me push through. That’s one of the things I really appreciate about the JavaScript community and ecosystem. I see so many passionate people, doing what they love. Almost everything is open-source, making learning JavaScript accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
