January 2018 - Baby's First Steps

I'm writing this in the beginning of February because I just got the idea of keeping a log now, but I'm going to try and summarize what I accomplished last month. So, about halfway through January, I saw a reddit post that was talking about this service, freeCodeCamp and how it was crazy that it was free for the courses they taught. I took some computer science classes in high school, but really fell off of that coming into University, but I decided that I was going to dip my toes in this. After some of the introductory HTML/CSS lessons, I caught the bug again, and went on a spree, completing task after task until I got to the first open-ended project.

I had to build a tribute page. After deciding the topic, I got to work on it and got a lot more frustrated than expected. When you have the world at your finger tips, decisions become hard to make, and I couldn't keep everything organized and neat the way I wanted it. Eventually persisting through that, I made a basic page that I was proud of, and moved on, because I was really excited for the next one.

The challenge was to build a personal portfolio. I've always thought about doing this myself, but I never really got motivated, but since it was an assigned to get the Front End Certification, I finally had the drive I needed. I jumped right into it and got into so many problems. I had to read up so much about positioning, centering, displays, and navbars trying to get everything stylized and working. I remember spending hours just trying to get the navbar functionally scrolling smoothly, but when I did I was lit. I even forked the project and made a complete animation for the hamburger to cross animation, which I'm still proud of. Although it looks really good and works well, there's still a ton of stuff I want to add and change, and I need to comment my code. Regardless, I was so hyped I hosted it on GitHub to show my friends, and bought the domain name leander.xyz.