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Week One - General Recap

In general I've faced some setbacks and frustrations for pretty much the latter end of the week. I sort of expected that for a couple of the days. It's just learning what I need to know to ask the right questions and how to learn in coding. It's a weird thing to that I need to learn how to learn. I have a BA, MPA, lived in another country...and I need to learn how to learn for coding. It's a bit remarkable. I can say the biggest setbacks for work has essentially been the following: finding time. It's not a lack of a desire to do the work. It's just finding time. I'm not spending 20 hours this week watching television. It's just basic day to day things for a family life. If I didn't have a toddler it would give more time. If I wasn't married I would have more time. If I didn't have dogs I would have more time. I'm not blaming my family at all for the lack of time, I mean I'm doing this for them, it's just learning to adapt ...

Day Four - The Struggle is Real

So our homework for the night consisted of getting an HTML file and a CSS file along with a screenshot of the webpage. We were told NOT to update the HTML file but do everything in CSS. Sure. I hit a problem because I couldn't get the images to connect to CSS so I "sort of" cheated so that I could actually do the assignment.   More on the problem I experiences in struggles/understood. Struggles: I hit a wall with the homework assignment last night. I hit it hard. I got super frustrated over one single line of code. For whatever reason I could not for the life of me figure out how to get a single line of code to turn bold. I mean one line I just couldn't get. There was no singular selector I could use that just made me mad. If I could only say "use this class and these two siblings I'll get it". I reached out to the group and explained and nothing. Someone looked at my code and they offered some advice but that wasn't helpful. But after expla...

Day Three - CSS

Our homework assignment was to create three html pages connected via links with a set of text for each. Fortunately the group activity we did a couple hours before was nearly identical but slightly more advanced. I finished it in pretty quick fashion. That being said one of the sites that I had to build bugs me. Creating a table in HTML is super painful to build row by row, cell by cell. Its not hard but time consuming with a single monitor. I understood it all and did it in a timely fashion but hated every second of that. Makes me want to know how to get data in faster from another source. So I guess that's the saving grace right? Our lessons to review last night were about CSS. Again…really blessed to have taken the Web Development Basics course previously. I, and a few others, have a bit of a head start on these topics. The following were my takeaways: Struggles: Continuous instructions in declaration. In CSS you can do all the content in the same row in the declara...

Day Two - Learning by People

Yesterday afternoon/early evening we finally received our first four assignments and assessments, mainly focusing on HTML. I know the assessments and the assignments were pretty long and would likely take some people a good chunk of time to complete. Fortunately I took the Web Development Basics class that covered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. I say fortunately because everything in the night’s work I understood and could probably teach to someone pretty easily the use of tags, different types of tags, and nesting. There was fortunately some new items that I got to grasp that I had seen but didn’t understand so that’s helpful. Also I think it would be helpful to record what I struggled with, understood (simply), and what I’m looking forward to. So I’ll try to keep that structure going forward. Struggles: Git. We spent a good chunk of the day yesterday getting everything set up correctly and I really struggled with Git. Not the commands or even merging. Tha...

Day One - First Review

So far the most we have really done is review the weekend assignment that we did prior to the beginning of class. Oddly this has been helpful as I struggled a bit with using Terminal, Shell, and Git. At this point during the break I understand Git, even though GitHub Desktop is available, and can probably actively use Git within Terminal. Terminal I mostly understand and will likely struggle a bit through this as I start to learn the command codes. Shell...whatever. I know the basics to some degree so I know I'll get there at some point soon-ish. We'll see how long it takes to pick up the new stuff. And on that note...individual assignments are looming over the horizon.

First Assignment

So things I kinda understood that I would be working on: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, SQL, C#, etc. All pretty much coding. Things I did not expect to start working on: Shell and Terminal.  I don't know why but creating local repositories, staging, and committing through a terminal seemed pretty much...something that wasn't going to be part of class. I was wrong. I'm starting to learn things, like stashing and git lists, that I will most likely forget. It's something that I'm sure in time I'll start using more frequently but man it was something I wasn't expecting to have to pick up. In some regards it makes sense to simply just go into the terminal and do a pull. But in a lot of ways it just seems like I could just do this from GitHub Desktop. I mean why open terminal to create a folder and then a file? Maybe it's faster than right clicking and doing New File and then create a document.  I guess we'll see what sticks in my head an...

Orientation

So we had our orientation yesterday and for the most part I didn't take a lot from it. There were introductions and an idea for a schedule but nothing that went "wow I'm ramped up". That being said the best thing I took from the session was having a taco with a current student that's nearing the end. Got some really good advice. In a nutshell he said I could do the program 40 hours a week and be okay but if I really want to take a lot from it and get a better job then go in with the plan to be the best student and take on all the extra work. So that's the plan. Be the best.