I have just resumed my Treehouse course with a view to get a job in 2021.

I now study for 4.5 hours per day (not just Treehouse), and practice (code) for 1.5-2 hours per day. I go through the material 4 times (with an additional 5th time if I still don't understand it).

What about you? How much do you study and code per day and how many times do you repeat the material? If you are currently working, you can just mention how much you studied before you got the job.

It would be interesting to compare with other students and former students of web design/development.

I work full time as a developer so some days I won't touch a computer after work, it depends if I have the energy or not. I try and do an hour a day if not.

I think it's different if you've just started learning or aiming to get into a new career, you'll need to put more time in. Personally I would get burnt out if I put in an additional 4 hours a day on top of what I do already, and I probably wouldn't retain much information. For me, I see better improvement when I learn in small consistent steps rather than large chunks of time.

When I was learning to become a dev I was doing about 60 hours a week, it was quite intense.  As a full time dev for the first 3 years I worked about 50hrs a week and did an additional 10-15 studying as I knew I had to level up significantly to get out of the web agency world.

That however is unsustainable for me long term so after getting my job at Sainsbury's I didn't work overtime, 40hrs a week and did about 10 hours studying.

I currently work 37.5 hours and study around 5 hours a week on average, although I do have a side project that takes up about 3-5 hours a week.   I am gradually reducing how much time I study outside of work, I'm fortunate enough to work in an environment were we are using bleeding edge technology on a daily basis so there's less of a requirement to learn things outside of work.

When it came to grasping things I often had to repeat courses multiple times.  I recall it took me about 8-10 attempts to properly understand what a closure was in JavaScript and when / why to use them.  Redux took me about 3 attempts to really feel comfortable with it (3 attempts as in Doing Dan Abramhov's course 3 times + building my own stuff).   I just take longer to learn than some people so just put in the time and stopped trying to compete with the very best in the industry ( I work with a few as @Jack would know having met them).
 

Edited January 28, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith

I'll also add to this thread that I track my time actually coding from inside my editor using wakatime.com. If you use it, try not to be sucked into the gamification side of the leader board. I have been in the top 10 on there before and the people that are high on the board are almost always working on ridiculous deadlines or will be close to burn out soon if they continue, so it's not realistic to compare your own time against other peoples. I do like it as an app though, it's interesting to see the stats each week.