Today's Progress: Worked on tutorials and a project on freeCodeCamp. Completed three sections of the Front End Development Certificate: HTML5 and CSS, Responsive Design with Bootstrap, and jQuery. Completed the first Basic Front End Development Project: a tribute page. Built a tribute page to my favorite baseball player growing up, Kirby Puckett.
Thoughts: It has been about 18 month since I really sat down to code anything significant. Today was about review and getting my mind back in the coding mindset. I was able to move through the HTML, CSS and responsive design tutorials on FCC very quickly. I understand all the basic concepts very well, but need more time experimenting with responsive design and layouts using CSS and Bootstrap to get more comfortable.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a tribute page to Kirby Puckett.
----
Today's Progress: Worked on tutorials and a project on freeCodeCamp. Worked on the Basic Javascript section of the Front End Development Certificate. Worked on the second Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage.
Thoughts: I spent most of the time dealing with setting up the formatting and layout of the personal portfolio page. I made some progress in understanding the gird system in the Bootstrap 4 CSS library. I need to take what I learned today and redo the basic layout of the page.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Worked on tutorials and a project on freeCodeCamp. Worked on the Basic Javascript section of the Front End Development Certificate. Worked on the second Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage.
Thoughts: I again spent most of the time dealing with setting up the formatting and layout of the personal portfolio page. I started a layout from scratch and was able to make progress on establishing a clear gird layout, including a fixed navbar at the top that stays in place when the user scrolls down the page. I am getting too caught up in making a perfect layout rather than just making something basic that works.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Worked on tutorials and a project on freeCodeCamp. Worked on the Basic Javascript section of the Front End Development Certificate. Worked on the second Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage.
Thoughts: I found a dynamic navbar that highlights the menu item as you scroll through the page on Stack Overflow (here) and adapted it for use on my personal profile page. I still don't completely understand what the JavaScript is doing, but I managed to get it operational.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Worked on tutorials and a project on freeCodeCamp. Worked on the Basic Javascript section of the Front End Development Certificate. Continued work on the a personal portfolio webpage.
Thoughts: The formatting and layout continued to be messy and confusing, so I re-did the layout of the page from scratch, clearly defining the structure and divs on the page.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Tinkered with the CSS on the personal portfolio webpage. Pushed the profile page to a Github repository. Setup my remote Mac mini server to work with my personal domain mattbowlby.com and got a basic installation of Wordpress up and running.
Thoughts: I have spent a lot of time tinkering with the tiny details on the profile project. While this has improved my understanding of CSS, I need to stop obsessing over the small details and move on with the project.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Tinkered around with the Wordpress setup for my personal blog on my Mac mini server. Refreshed my knowledge of Wordpress and Mac Server configuration (setting up Wordpress permalinks, refining file permissions).
Thoughts: I have made several attempts over the years to run my own personal blog off of a colocated Mac mini server. Sooner or later I end up messing up the server settings or Wordpress installation and doing a fresh install. This is a fresh clean start once again. It's important for me to continue to push forward and run Wordpress off my server. It's helping gain strength on the command line and better understand how server configuration works.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Took pieces of example Bootstrap pages and re-did my personal profile page.
Thoughts: I just couldn't get the CSS and grid layout right by starting from scratch. The project looks much cleaner now. I have clearly defined all sections of the page. Now I need to work on the smaller details and refine the contact section.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Making the final touches on the personal profile page. Worked on the perfected the layout and functionality of the contact form. Tried to implement jQuery onClick() to send an e-mail with the form info in the subject and body. Also took a peek on some courses on Code School.
Thoughts: It feels good to play around with JavaScript and jQuery to implement some simple interactive functionality. I got the click function working, but the e-mail message is not populating with the form info.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage (work in progress).
Today's Progress: Finished the personal profile page from freeCodeCamp. Last piece involved figuring out the contact form. Wrote my own function in JavaScript from scratch for the first time.
Thoughts: I was having trouble figuring out how to submit the contact form input via e-mail. I tried copying other exmaples on the web at first. Then I tried searching Stackoverflow for code examples and solutions. After some frustration I decided to outline the steps necessary and attempt to write my own JavaScript function with jQuery to solve the problem. Ended up with my own function consisting of two lines of code that worked. The function appended the action attribute to the form tag with a mailto. The mailto included a subject and body using the e-mail and message inputs from the form. It was satisfying to write my own function after reading the jQuery documentation and have the function do exactly as intended. The most helpful step here was to outline each step I wanted to accomplish by writing them down in order on commented out lines in the script. I then attempted to code each piece step by step.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage.
Today's Progress: Worked on freeCodeCamp exercises using switch statements and objects.
Thoughts: I was already familiar with objects and arrays to some degree, however switch statements are something entirely new for me. I also tried adding my a personal portfolio webpage to Codepen, but the CSS and formatting doesn't show up correctly. I am not sure what is wrong, because the local version I pushed to Github works perfectly. I will arttempt to fix it later.
Link to work: Basic Front End Development Project: a personal portfolio webpage.
Today's Progress: Completed the Basic Javascript Unit of freeCodeCamp's Front End Development Certificate. Worked on arrays, objects, for loops, and regular expressions.
Thoughts: I completed the exercises, but have not mastered the concepts. I need to continue to solve simple problems with these contacts.
Link to work:
Today's Progress:
Completed the Object Oriented and Functional Programming Unit of freeCodeCamp's Front End Development Certificate. Worked on the first six (of 17) basic algorithm scripting challenges.
Thoughts:
The basic algorithm challenges were indeed challenging. I did my best to use the Read-Search-Ask methodology to solve the problems. At first I tried using StackOverflow to find answers to my quesitons, but felt this was skipping the "read" step and moving straight to "search". I then tried relying first on w3schools and the Mozilla Developer Network as general resources. This general documentation gave me a deeper understanding of the different classes and methods I needed to solve the problems. Solving each problem brought me a tremendous amount of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Link to work:
Today's Progress:
Watched the first few tutorial videos from Wes Bos' JavaScript30 course. Completed the first of 30 projects: a drum kit. Played around with own similar solution. Continued working on basic algorithm scripting challenges as part of freeCodeCamp's Front End Development Certificate. Organized all course work into GitHub repos with the objective of showcasing all projects and output I generate while learning to code.
Thoughts:
I completed the exercises, but have not mastered the concepts. I need to continue to solve simple problems with these contacts.
Link to work: For the moment I'll be working with three main repos:
- 100 Days of Code: logging my progress during the #100DaysOfCode challenge;
- freeCodeCamp: all projects for freeCodeCamp's Front End Development Certificate;
- JavaScript30: all projects for @wesbos course JavaScript30;
Today's Progress:
Learned how to use the terminal more effectively. Configured iTerm2 to use Oh-My-Zsh with some plugins to increase productivity on the command line. Built a basic site using a Bootstrap navbar to log my progress and showcase exercise solutions and projects from freeCodeCamp's Front End Development Certificate.
Thoughts:
I am gaining confidence with the terminal just by pure exposure. Installing Oh-My-Zsh and configuring iTerm2 brought me a little closed to understand things under the hood (like ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile).
Link to work: For the moment I'll be working with three main repos:
- Matt's freeCodeCamp Course Site: site to log my progress, exercise solutions and projects;
Today's Progress:
Continued work on the basic algorithm challenges at freeCodeCamp. Got a better understanding of for each loops.
Thoughts:
One of the algorithm challenges required using a for each loop nested inside another for each loop. After solving three challenges, I found some wonderful posts by @SonyaMoisset on Medium breaking down the basic algorithm challenges and different ways to solve each problem. It is extremely helpful to read and understand a solution from through through the eyes of an experienced coder and to see alternative solutions to a problem.
Link to work:
Today's Progress:
Watched sample coding interviews on YouTube.
Thoughts:
It was very interesting to watch the sample coding interview. It came across to me as a wonderful intellectual exercise where you work out a solution to a problem under pressure and on the spot. It also struck me that there really is no way to fake your way through it. You really must have both the raw fundamental skills and have developed the ability to think through problems with the mindset of a programmer and problem solver. There are also likely many answers to a problem. The challenge is to find an ever more simple and efficient solution.
Link to work:
Today's Progress:
Solved two more basic algorithm problems on freeCodeCamp.
Thoughts:
I am starting to feel more comfortable attacking the problems and starting to think through them piece by piece from many angles.
Link to work: