HTMLoooo Old Friend
Storytime! It’s fun because the story I’m going to tell feels REEEEEAAAALLY old. In reality, we’re going back to March of 2020. In my mind, we’re going back 20 years.
So I’ve been slowly but surely updating this old Ruby Sinatra app I’ve got going. I’m enjoying it, it’s called Vinyl Records. Very soon to be deployed on Heroku! Check it out if you feel so inclined. (I feel like I’ve been working on the updates of this for forever, but quite honestly I have to go a bit easy on myself here. I work full-time, I have a family I care about, a life. Ya know, the usual stuff.) Anyway, as I’m working on this app, I’m finding myself needing to Google a lot of little things here and there about HTML and CSS.
And as I’m going through, I’m realizing how much I really enjoy writing both of those things. I know they’re no React or Javascript, but look, I enjoy it. And I don’t want to use the word simple here, but I’m going to. Without sounding lazy, I just want to say that I enjoy the simplicity of those two languages. And I may only be saying that because they’re the two I started this journey with!
Ok, so the story I’m not telling linearly. Back in March 2020 I decided to give this coding thing a try. And I took a really great Udemy course with Colt Steele. Loved his course! That course was primarily HTML and CSS. So getting to mess around with a bit of that again was super fun! And it reminded me of some resources and advice Colt gave that I would love to reiterate here:
- Color picker. If you don’t know about this, it’s not just a good source for choosing a color and getting the RGB, or Hex, or whatever you need, I’ve honestly just used it to get a better idea of complementary colors and color palettes in general. I am NOT a designer, so being able to see as many colors as I want/need with a quick Google search is so fun!
2. MDN. The MDN Web Docs are amazing!!! If I Google search for something coding-related I will 100% choose a link to MDN over a link to StackOverflow. I don’t need twelve people telling me how stupid I am. Sorry, not sorry StackOverflow. MDN is a really great pile of documentation. And I had no idea what it was before. And I remember it feeling like a lot to take in at first. Now that thought seems really funny, but it’s so crazy to go back and think about the things I use regularly now, that were a really big deal to me when I first starting this journey!
3. Learning how/why/when whatever you’re creating with was made, actually helps a lot with how to use that thing well. I was watching a neat show on Netflix called High Score and learning about video game origins and how they evolved to be what they are today. It’s actually really fun and interesting! Even if you aren’t big on video games it’s really neat! Anyway, watching that show made me realize how understanding why something was made, gives me a greater respect for that thing, and makes it easier to use it because I have a better understanding of what it’s capabilities are. For example, this is a one sentence definition of HTML straight from Wikipedia:
“The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.”
Great! So when you want to add layers to your HTML, you can use CSS, or Javascipt, or both! And there are even more layers on top of that! And that’s as complicated as that gets. Cool!
Colt does a great job of explaining some quick web history and giving beginners an understanding of why all these things work, and gives a great introduction into how.
And he actually just updated his Web Developer Bootcamp course in October of 2020, so I’m excited to go back and re-do some of it! It’ll probably help me with a bit of this view rendering in this Ruby app.
The moral of the story is… don’t forget your roots! I suppose I really wanted to post this because thinking back to March 2020, I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come even with all the craziness we’ve been living with. Am I a super sharp developer? Absolutely not, but I’ve learned a lot and I’m excited about what else is out there. I’ve gone from a really cool Udemy course, to graduating Flatiron’s full-stack engineering bootcamp. I may not have as much time to devote to this as I did in the summer of 2020, but I still enjoy doing it! And I think that’s really cool. I don’t always feel that way, so I’m happy to have that spark again! Looking forward to what’s next in the coding journey.
Until next time, happy coding! 🤘🏻
