At the beginning of the semester, I started with a little basic understanding of HTML and CSS just from watching my friend help me code my original portfolio website. But now, midway through the semester, I’m able to create my own portfolio website and I can understand most online tutorials on how to create things in pure HTML/CSS. During the assignment when we were told to make a mockup of Craigslist, I made one that turned out to be extremely hard for me to code when we were told to create the mockup the next week. I barely knew how to div things properly and how to create layouts and I was kind of thrown into the deep end with that. But the very next week, we learned to use flexboxes, and Flexbox Froggy was a gamechanger for me. Flexboxes really connected the dots in my brain between designing on Figma and coding in HTML, as they acted as autolayouts in Figma and then Figma can provide the code necessary to produce that kind of layout, all I have to figure out is how to div things correctly. Although I use Figma alot, I often avoid the autolayout function because it limits certain design capabilities, but now I realize that it helps a lot with the designer → frontend developer handoff in making their job easier. With the knowledge of what I can achieve in HTML/CSS, I was able to design a portfolio for the midterm that I was very proud of, and will continue to expand on in my own time, as it’s something that I need to showcase my skills for my internship applications.
As for the last question about remaining engaged, inspired, and productive, I don’t think I will have an issue with this, as front-end development and coding in general is something that I’m pushing myself to get really good at this semester(I’m taking two other coding classes and I live on VS Code now). It’s a skill and a tool that I really hope to apply to my work in the future.
This article is so long and dense, so I read the beginning and the languages section, and it was interesting but it really didn’t keep my attention for long since it was not catered towards my own understanding of code as an undergraduate student. The user experience of reading the essay was terrible: while the pictures and the diagrams were very interesting, it was just so insanely long and text-heavy that I scrolled past all the interesting parts. The UX might be enhanced by more visual storytelling rather than massive chunks of words that could be made so much more concise if the author did not constantly ramble on about random examples and focused more on the actual content. I don’t care about his “Legend of the 10x old skeleton” when his article is over 5000 words long.
However, I do have to say that the interactive diagrams are very interesting and effective, specially the code simulators and the very first graph at the top. The character also made the experience reading the article really funny when it tells me that I’m scrolling too fast or paused for too long. One thing I did find interesting about the article is how he mentions the processes behind something as simple as typing an “a” on the keyboard. It’s fascinating to think about what operates in the background of our coding languages, a system that is often unnoticed and underappreciated. Also I found the graph of most popular coding language by country very interesting, as America was the only country where Python was the most popular, and this made me wonder what it is like for software engineers to collaborate internationally and if there are any differences between them.