February 2018 - Moving on to the Advanced Stuff
Guess that's what the real world is like for web development.
So I'm late again to provide an update but I think I'm getting the hang of this whole front end development thing. I've been looking through GitHub, programming blogs/tutorial, and personal blogs to learn from each of them as to what tools they use and how they implement them. As of now, I've completed all the Intermediate Front End projects on freeCodeCamp and I'm working through the final Advanced ones. I have to say, I'm really proud of how the Intermediate ones turned out! I tried my best to make the responsive and tested them on mobile, and thin/long windows and they seem to be functional, but for every new screen size I find that breaks something, it's a whole 20 step process to figure out how to approach it. I definitely think that media queries, and responsiveness in general is the part I'm having the most trouble with. I find myself focusing heavily on that rather than actually finishing the apps which I'm not sure how I feel about. On one hand, I'm being a perfectionist, and not allowing myself to progress because one div has an odd display error, but on the other hand it makes for a final product that I'm much more proud of. The issue with that is that anyone to whom I show my 3h of responsiveness work to can't even tell that anything is different and I just feel silly. Guess that's what the real world is like for web development huh!
I think I just want to talk a little bit about the individual projects. The Random Quote Machine I definitely think turned out really well, but the mobile port still has some bugs, though, with my backlog, I'm never really sure when I'll get to that. It is very colourful and has a vibrant feel to it, and the buttons all function properly with no ugly css alterations anymore!
The Local Weather App is probably my least favourite of the bunch. Not only is the API itself buggy (I know that's out of my control, but still), but it also seems very bland to me. There are also so many formatting issues that I never noticed while writing it, that now -- if I'd like to change them -- would be a very tedious process to rip out and start anew. I think overall, it works, but it definitely could have been better.
The Twitch.tv Viewer however, is definitely one of my favourite apps. I learnt so much about the Bootstrap 4 and that all played a part in the final design of the website. It works, and sorts, and searches and it turned out remarkably well in my opinion. However, even though it didn't take long to write the JS part, but I was so specific with the CSS that it probably took about a week too long to complete.
Finally, the WikiViewer is my favourite front end project thus far. It turned out exactly as I had pictured and looks great on any device. It responds fast and I even went above and beyond, getting rid of the need to even open Wikipedia! The page loads the first paragraph from the article into a modal that displays with share links and the main page image! It definitely looks professional to me and makes me really excited to show people and brag about to anyone willing to listen.
It's actually the first week of March right now, and I've actually completed the JS Calculator as well and that's another project that turned out really well. I finally used the meta tag which made formatting for mobile 1000% easier! I even took out the 300ms delay so that it would work smoothly on mobile. The hardest part about this project was the JavaScript. You never really realize how complex the inner workings of something like a calculator are until you have to do the work yourself!
Now all that said, I would say I had some issues this month. I feel as though I got far less done and I am really not proud of that, but I've been trying to boost my life all around as of late. I've been doing a lot of work and reading up on personal finance, productivity, time management, and all things of the sort. I even played around with maybe streaming or recording myself coding, but I think it would eat up too much time, trying to balance the video development afterwards, my full-time job and my online course work, as well as everything else previously mentioned. With all this, my time dedication for coding has taken a big hit as well, but I'm looking to improve that for next month with everything I've gathered now about managing myself and focusing on results. Hopefully, by the this time in a few weeks, I'll have earned my Front End Development Certificate from freeCodeCamp!