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Jennifer Tieu
Jennifer Tieu

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Self-Taught Developer Journal, Day 6: Pivot and The Odin Project

Today I learned…

Pivot

Life is so strange sometimes, or maybe it’s just the YouTube algorithm, but I was watching Thomas Frank's video, 7 Books EVERYONE in Their 20s Should Read, this morning and a book he recommended caught my attention. The book was Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake and it's meant for anyone looking to move or change careers. It was the perfect recommendation for my life at the moment. I bought the book and currently reading it. So far, its been awesome at helping me navigate my thoughts and I wish I had started this journey with reading the book first. Better late than never.

The Odin Project

I've been having a tough time being engaged with the Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele on Udemy. It wasn't because of the content, I think he's a great teacher and its a great course, but I think I was looking for something else. So, ta-da, the Odin Project! Now, the Odin Project I've already heard of in passing a few times, but it came up again yesterday when I started reading The Coding Career Handbook by Shawn Wang and it was listed as a resource. After seeing the Odin Project pop up so many times, I finally decided to check it out. I was impressed by the Foundations Path. It was simple, direct, and included projects very early. I was really looking for something that was more hands on and to the point since I already have programming experience. I also liked how they have their own Discord community.

In short, I am now switching to the Odin Project (sorry Colt) and already halfway through since the first half I covered on Udemy.

  • Flexbox
    • A way to arrange items into rows or columns, where those items grow or shrink based on rules that you define.
    • Not just a single CSS property but a toolbox of properties
    • A flex container is any element that has display: flex on it. A flex item is any element that lives directly inside of a flex container.
    • Any element can be both a flex container and a flex item. Said another way, you can also put display: flex on a flex item, and then use flexbox to arrange its children.
  • Axis
    • The flexbox is composed and referred in terms of two axes - the main axis and cross axis.
    • The main axis is defined by the flex-direction property and is horizontal or row by default.
    • The cross axis is perpendicular to the main axis.
  • Alignment
    • Arranging items inside of a flexbox by aligning or justifying them along the main-axis with justify-content and cross-axis with align-items.
    • Properties are applied on the flex container.
  • Gap
    • Adds a specified space between flex items, similar to margin.

Resources:
The Odin Project
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Flexible_Box_Layout/Basic_Concepts_of_Flexbox

Day 5: https://dev.to/jennifer_tieu/self-taught-developer-journey-day-5-1ee8
Please refer to Starting My Self-Taught Developer Journey for context.

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