Hanging on for dear life!

Week 4 entry for my coding bootcamp diary:

Fresh off project week and I’m feeling good. While my project was far from perfect, I am very proud of what I was able to accomplish in a short amount of time. It feels good to come into the week on a big “win”. If you would like to read about it, follow this link here: https://dev.to/jareichert/i-pity-the-fool-who-doesnt-use-python-27if

After our project presentations last Friday, our instructor laid out what was going to be happening the next few weeks. This upcoming week, we will be tackling HTML. The following week we will be covering CSS. Then JavaScript for the third week. After that, another solo project week, with the goal to create a full fledged working web page, using JS and API. We are getting into more and more acronyms so things are starting to get serious around here! This past weekend I spent a lot of times going over HTML and JavaScript so feel as prepared as I can be coming into the week.

DAY 1

All morning we learned the basics of HTML. Tags, elements, lists, links, headings, paragraphs, div’s, we knocked out all of the basics right off of the bat. Surprisingly enough, my instructor revealed that he only uses the h1, div, and p tags when he codes in html. It would appear that all of that time spent studying HTML this past weekend might have been an unproductive use of my time. In the afternoon, we had to pick a website from the nineties and recreate it using HTML only. I chose a random Yahoo website from……Check it out:

DAY 2

Hmmmmmm…..it appears that the beforementioned timeline has been moved up a bit. Today we went over CSS. We learned the structure of a basic CSS document, different ways to link the CSS document to our HTML and different ways we can style our website using CSS. Pretty easy day conceptually for me overall. However, with the accelerated timeline, a feeling of dread is starting to come over me. Like a bad storm on the horizon…..

Day 3:

And the storm has arrived! Holy smokes, my head is spinning. We went over what feels like two fairly large topics today: CSS Grid and CSS Flexbox. My brain feels like one of those snow globes that has been shaken up sending all the snow spinning violently inside of the globe.

By the end of the day I couldn’t tell you what was a grid term, what was a flexbox term, or what either one of them did.

Day 4 & 5:

The last two days of the week were a blur of tic-tac-toe boards, pixel artwork projects, blogpost layouts, checkerboard layout, and website layouts. I spent a lot of my free time watching youtube videos from the following people

These two fine folks really saved my bacon as far as helping me get a little better grasp of CSS styling. If you need some extra help with CSS like I did, you should definitely check them out!

This week is definitely my first week of feeling a little bit overwhelmed. It’s funny, but CSS was the absolute last language I was worried about coming into this bootcamp and it’s the first one to knock me upside the head. Which has me worried about the other languages which I perceive to be more difficult. But, who knows. All I can do is keep moving forward.

NONTECHNICAL

One huge takeaway from my project last week is I need to laser focus on the absolute requirements of a project and then move out from there. During the project, I started day-dreaming about and working on the “extras” for the project before I had the bare bones in place. It resulted in a couple of late nights of scrambling to make sure I had all of the checkboxes checked. In the future, I need to make sure I have the bare necessities taken care of first and foremost before worrying about fancying it up.

Obviously, my instructor spends a lot of time going over the technical side of this profession. But, one extra thing he does that I really enjoy is his willingness to speak frankly about the industry as a whole. He speaks very plainly about searching for a job, the job market, working with recruiters, what it’s like working for a startup, what it's like working for a larger corporation, money, salary structure, work/life balance…..nothing is off limits. During one of these side lectures, he said something in particular that really stood out. He said: “Make them tell you no”. In this instance, he was speaking about applying for a job. Specifically, he was saying, just because YOU don’t think you have enough experience or feel like an imposter, don’t let that stop you from applying for the job you want. Make them make the decision on whether you are appropriate for the job or not. Make them tell you no. While this is great advice for the job search, I think it is even better advice to apply to life.

What I've been listening to this week:

What have you been listening to this past week?