From Front Desk to Front End p.22

Hello everyone!!! I have been popping into LinkedIn every now and then, but oh my blog is a slower place!

January is really busy for Skillcrush, unsurprisingly, so I continued to give myself space to adjust!

Admittedly, I was also riding a wave of already landing a better job that I love and the holidays.

THEN I went down some rabbit holes because I because very aware of how close I am to being HIRABLE as a front end developer and I think I started to freak out about whether or not I had made the right choice.
I started exploring User Experience again bc it FASCINATES me and Skillcrush just launched their UI/UX design track! Information Architecture is what started this entire journey into tech for me, back when it was part of my Library Science master's degree program. I was pretty feverish with the idea that I was now going to have to start learning a new set of skills, and I scheduled a chat with a mentor at Skillcrush to talk through my decisions, BUT ultimately decided that, when it comes to what I really want to do THE MOST it's the coding.
So now I am set, and that makes me feel re-excited about coding all over again! I'm going to start getting into the good Javascipt stuff more by looking at Eloquent JavaScript by Marjin Haverbeke which came onto my radar thanks to @mckennabramble (who is doing some awesome things on her blog, btw).
I do think learning about User Experience will ultimately make me a better developer tho, AND it's so interesting, so I also purchased Dont Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug bc I enjoyed reading excerpts from this book during my brief time in grad school. ✨

So now I'm putting up my structures to get into that regular discipline again!

That time is CARVED OUT! I'm using loose planner pages again bc I have more to organize. (I actually have been JOURNALING more even if I haven't been blogging very much. 😆) My girlfriend will be taking some art classes in the evenings, so I'm stepping it up with cooking dinner, but it also means more evening time that I have to code!

I have been working on my portfolio sporadically over this past month.

So some lessons in coding this month:

• I have started adding GIT PULL FIRST to the tops of all my coding session times on my planner pages, so that's helping me keep on track with good .
• I reviewed some SASS basics by going over the direct documentation, and am interested in implementing nesting, mixins, and extend for this project. Going to plan and try things to make sure I'm being smart about it! I would prefer to work on the straight CSS first, then convert it, esp this first time..
• I reviewed some Flexbox on CSS Tricks
• I took some time to decrease my project images then ran them through tinypng per the recommendation of one of the instructors Ann on our Slack channel (and learning some things for this blog!)
• Made sure I was understanding the html and body selectors in my CSS. My main gleaning from this is that the html selector includes the head as well, which I am not styling, and should only be adjusted if I am 1. Trying to adjust the root font-size standard (which I have learned can be adjusted in screen readers UNLESS I fix it, so can't see myself fixing it unless I want the standard to be larger) or 2. Want to put a background that does not flood the viewport, which apparently happens when applying backgrounds to the body

Before putting everything into a Flexbox:

And now I am FINALLY making some meaningful progress on my portfolio now, starting with the first half of the mobile styles with my nav, hero area, and projects in mobile.

I had to recalibrate a lot. When I launched into coding my portfolio initially, I got a little wild with the flexboxes with like illusions of ultimate control or something 💪. I made way too many elements and their nested elements flexy, then like strong armed them into abiding the way I wanted them to 😂 But there was no logic to the structure! So I took a breath, looked at some other websites for inspiration, and started to be a lot more consciousness about my flexy placement and resulted in a much cleaner layout. Phew! 💦 Checkout the code progress on on Github

Cover Art Photo Credit to Alexander Grey from Pexels.com