I’ve just finished my Mobile Web Specialist course after completing my final project. I covered a lot of ground between the first project and the third one, including transforming a website into a performant offline-first web app. Each project stage was professionally evaluted and I received a line-by-line code review of my work, which wa really helpful for getting useful feedback. I managed to zip through the stages pretty quickly, because I had completed most of the lessons already through my scholarship program (all of the lessons in the Nanodegree are available for free). The course runs until the end of October but I’m now finished two months early.
Inarguably, the best leg of the journey was the instruction leading up to the final project. These covered servers, APIs, and integrating them into a website to create an offline-first app. This was always a mysterious concept to me, but these final lessons really demystified the construction of such an app. I found it really interesting to create a website that responds to a simple server via the FetchAPI. In the first project, I was given a poorly designed website with minimal functionality, but now it’s exceeding 90 on the Progressive Web App, Performance, and Accessibility audits on Chrome Lighthouse. In my head, I knew vaguely how to apply these concepts to increase the performance of a website, but this was an excellent case study for actually applying those ideas. With this under my belt, I know I can do it—and I have the digital certification to prove it!
This journey has lasted most of this year, starting in January when I was first invited to a scholarship group through Google, and ending now at the end of July with the entire Nanodegree behind me. When I first started, the end goal was to complete the Nanodegree, get certified through Google, then start an aggressive job search for a front-end developer role. However, while completing the course, I actually received a promotion at my current company and am now doing all front-end work for our high-volume websites and a proprietary e-learning platform. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to apply these skills further in my career, and I’m interested to see where it takes me!
Now that I’ve finished the Google course, however, I’m really excited to have back a large chunk of my free time. I’ll have more energy to work on hobby coding projects, of which I have a few currently planned. I’m eager to see how the rest of 2018 unfolds!