Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Day 2

CSS: It's all about making things pretty! 

Woke up at 5am today. Either the time difference from the east coast is having more of an effect on me than I originally thought, or this is just mentally exhausting causing me to sleep much earlier. Probably a bit of both. 

Started and finished assignment 1 of 4 for the CSS portion of the bootcamp. These assignments involve replicating static websites. All those text boxes I took for granted in blogger, now I have to not only make them myself, position them too. Each website get progresses in difficulty. The first one was a plain website with texts and hyperlinks. The second one includes a banner, picture, search bar, and more. 

It's pretty overwhelming when looking at a new website to replicate (on my second one). Brain is just digesting all the CSS that needs to be done, calculating how many pixels is a box away from a boarder and the dimensions of every textbox / container. Breaking down the overall layout with divs has helped calm my mind a lot in these beginning stages. Once the page is laid out everything seems much more doable. Proabably most of the page is now filled with boxes so it's not a blank canvas staring you in the face. 

Overall: I definitely feel that it was a good idea to come to this bootcamp. Working with people on the same assignments helps tremendously when stuck. Today some of my code kept breaking because I had closed a link tag in the wrong place while nesting another unordered list in it. The selectors I was using kept breaking because of this and I wasn't able to modify the nested list. With the help of a TA who figured out the problem in a matter of minutes (after I had another student look at it) I was able to move on. Problems like these would have taken me hours to figure out by myself. It's something that's not easily recognizable as "wrong" and may have taken days to figure it out with the help of online communities.   

If nothing goes wrong the amout of work completed should be similar if I was working by myself, but things go wrong, and often. This is when working in bootcamps like Coding Dojo saves expotential amount of time. Even when working by myself the amount of time dedicated in a single day at Coding Dojo can sometimes be equivalent to a week working alone due to work and other obligations. 

CSS until the end of the week. Looking to complete my second CSS assignment and moving onto the third. 

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