Thanks to CodeNewbie for sharing my last post on the Twitter feed this week! I'm mostly writing these for myself, but am very happy if anything in these posts helps others. Even if it's just to feel not so alone in this coding journey. ❤️
I'm excited to have four weeks (and a few days) of consistent coding under my belt again! It feels really great overall, even though there have been some frustrating moments. (Looking at you, git. 🤦)
I finally finished my vision board!
The hardest part for me was getting the right look. And while I'm still not super in love with it, I do like it and it's fine for now. I used CSS Gradient to fine-tune the radial gradient for the background, which was a huge help. I probably could have spent another 2 or 3 hours trying to find the best font, but am satisfied enough with it as is. I should definitely do some design classes to learn design best practices so I can be better equipped for these sorts of things. Or maybe just put together a grouping of go-to fonts and colors?
I also worked on a Frontend Mentor challenge to replicate a QR Code. You can see my solution compared to the original design. It's not pixel perfect, but I think I did pretty well. It felt great to solve the problem, even if that included having to search for how to get the card for the QR code to be vertically centered. And using code that I don't yet fully grasp - another thing to work on learning!
I've started some JavaScript and am really enjoying the logic of it. Logic was one of my favorite classes I had to take for my Philosophy degree in college. I liked the syntax and specific symbols. And those are some of the things I like about coding in general, too!
The times I've really struggled with JavaScript so far are mostly due to syntax and punctuation, so I just need more practice with those to become more familiar. Hopefully writing out the punctuation will eventually become more of a muscle memory situation than actively remembering open-paren, end-paren, open-curly-brace... etc. It will help more with debugging, too, if I can spot what's out of place more easily.
Unless, of course, the reason my JavaScript isn't working is I have the pre-forked codesandbox URL open in my browser, not my forked-edited-resaved project URL, so when I save and refresh the website isn't responding the way I expect it to. Whoops! 😅 That sort of debugging requires attention to detail, too, but also a bit of confidence. Instead of only thinking something is wrong with my code, having some confidence in myself that I do understand the code I've written and it should be working will make it easier to check more basic things, like that I'm using the right save file/URL!
Have you had a similar experience of catching an error that you didn't see at first because you thought your code must have been wrong, but the code was perfect the whole time and you were just looking in the wrong place or something? I'd love to know I'm not alone in this!
I hope you have a great week!
Top comments (4)
These questions are always fun 😄
In a sense! I do this periodically with some research assistance work that I do. I write computing jobs for a math professor and often he just uses alphabetical characters as variables. I follow suit in my code. Often, when something isn't working as expected, I'll get hung on reviewing the logic and the logic will be fine. However, sometimes I may just be accidentally using the wrong letter somewhere. It's hard to catch because one character doesn't stand out well (especially when there are variables named
vandwin a program).So the code isn't perfect, but my mind does focus on the part that is perfect when something goes wrong.
The questions are fun for me, too! 😄
That's a great example! I think I experience something similar when I've got a typo somewhere - I end up going over the logic several times before noticing I used the wrong punctuation or misspelled something. One letter variable errors would be so hard to spot!
Hi Misty! I really love the gradient! Honestly, CodeSandbox can be a buggy boi, so I have learned to refresh/ check my save file as a first step to debugging code lol. Thank you for sharing! I have heard that JavaScript and Philosophy are actually pretty similar.
Hi, McKenna!
CodeSandbox can be so buggy! That is a great first step and I think I'm finally getting the hang of checking the save file first instead of assuming I did something wrong. 😂