Yesterday my flight from Costa Rica landed in Sacramento. Today, I’m back at the desk writing CSS with my brand new keyboard.
For the second half of Week 3 and the beginning of Week 4, I was not thinking about web development as I walked up and down the beaches of Guanacaste. (Did you know you can pay with USD at most places in Costa Rica?) I was lucky enough to have time to complete most of my assignments prior to my departure. Now, I’m in the process of catching up on a few stragglers and preparing for Week 5.
For the first part of this class, I was more than a little concerned that I’d lost most of my coding abilities over winter break. Now that we’re a few weeks in, I’ve found myself back in the flow of things. I still have to google the occasional CSS property, however, but usually only to remember the name (looking at you, justify-content.)
Just a month or two ago, it felt like I was opening a new search tab every few minutes as I struggled through my HTML and CSS files. Web dev was a frustrating, exhausting ordeal. Now, I’m finding it much easier to write my code correctly from the start. I finally feel like I have a strong understand of flexbox and semantic HTML. I will definitely need more practice, but I can now compare my abilities then and now and see the progress I’m making. Web dev is now an exciting, stimulating adventure.
I really enjoyed the creating my Mark Up Page. I got to relive some of my memories from Italy, practice semantic HTML and reinforce my CSS understanding all at the same time. I also enjoyed the refresher on web fonts, although I didn’t learn anything new thanks to my typography obsession (addiction).
I also enjoyed making my portal page. I’ve gone through this process before, but its nice to finally have a solid understanding of what I’m doing while hosting my files. For example, I’ve gotten much better about containing each assignment in its own folder. Linking to AssignmentOne/index.html is a lot more straightforward than tossing everything into one big folder and trying to find out why Alex Sawicky – Flexbox Challenges 11 – 20 Index.html isn’t resolving correctly. Now I just drop the assignment folder into the server, add a link, and done! No file renaming required.
My takeaway from these past two weeks is to slow down. If your code doesn’t yield the desired result, take a breath and try again. I’ve been trying my best to limit resorting to google for my coding troubles. It might take a moment, but most of the knowledge is there. I’m now at the point where I can usually figure my way out of a CSS or HTML problem, as long as I can remember to slow down.
Where wired will limit your workspace, wireless will set you free.
Cheers, and happy coding.
Alex