From Craft to Code

After one week of diving straight into hands on coding my brain is fried but my spirits are high! I know there is so much work ahead of me but knowing that I'm capable of learning at this pace is really encouraging. Just five short days ago I didn't know anything about command line, knew conceptually how to push project files to git but never actually had confidently, and certainly hadn't ever created a mock up of a web page from scratch with HTML and CSS. Along the way I've discovered there were more road blocks in my way than I realized. I haven't ever been familiar with Mac interface so just looking for my files and switching between windows took way longer than it should be. I'm not super in tune with my learning style either so it has been difficult to sort between what I didn't understand and what I couldn't remember. Any mistake I've made along the way I doubted my understanding of the material instead of assuming I spelled something wrong o...

So far there hasn't been a topic we didn't, as a class, just jump in to. While at least half of the class has previous experience with HTML and CSS the rest of us were immediately staring at a blank text editor wondering how to start 'just coding'. By the time the day ended I had a web page that looked decent but I had fumbled through the entire activity and it took me twice as long as most others. But I did it. Not to toot my own horn but it looked great too! I had done that. Sure, I had collaborated to see what the proper commands were for some things and googled how to make a rounded corner but I had still been the one to physically type everything. Next time the same project might take me half the amount of time because I won't spend an hour figuring out whether to add margins in percentages or pixels. I have a list in my notebook of broad ideas that I would love to go back over when the class is finished. There are some proper procedures and 'etiquett...

Two days ago I started The Iron Yard in Raleigh. If you haven't heard of Iron Yard yet, you will. This is a bootcamp style certificate program in web development. We have four weeks of learning front end development, four weeks of back end dev, and four weeks of 'specialization' or language learning. It's Day Three and I've already learned more than I did in a year of free online courses and tutorials. And I. Am. Exhausted. But exhilarated! The first day covered how to work in command line and using terminal to work in git and push commits to github. The second we covered basic html and even created a three page interactive 'site' without any css or javascript. More importantly though, there is a lot of focus on the REAL work. We are learning how to 'just do it' without understanding the bigger picture or knowing how it works or why you're doing it. Programming is very much a second language and immersion is key. Now this code snippet may ...