Today's Progress: Worked through part of the tutorial offered by Github to familiarize yourself with the site. Forked the 100-days-of-code repository to begin this log. While there was some active code work, this was more a read and learn day.
Thoughts: Like a lot of new topics under the huge umbrella of computer science, Git and Github seem overwhelming to me at first. But even after a short time parts of it are already becoming more familiar. Tomorrow I should finish setting up my Hello World repository so I can begin logging exercises, projects and guided tutorials.
Link to work: N/A, as the landing page would be right here!
Today's Progress: More Github stuff today! Went through the quickstart, creating repositories just to play around with pull requests, branches, merging etc. Downloaded GitHub Desktop and did half of the exercise there to start getting familiar.
Thoughts: Tomorrow I'm going to continue with a Git tutorial and uploading an HTML project via Git to get used to these tools. After that I think back to my current FCC project: Learn Intermediate CSS by Building a Picasso Painting.
Link to work: Here is a link to my little hello-world repository: currently only populated by a README file listing some basic goals and plans I have for the immediate future. If you want to push some learning suggestions to the main branch, feel free!
Today's Progress: I round off my three-day exploration of GitHub and all things Git by creating a local repository using Git Bash and then pushing it to GitHub as a brand new one. Now I have created, pushed and pulled repositories using GitHub, GitHub Desktop, and Git Bash; I wanted to be at least passingly familiar with each method.
Thoughts: Had some fun comparing the troubleshooting skills of ChatGPT and Phind when I had any issues: while Phind goes into much more detail and cites it's sources, ChatGPT's concise and quick answers served me better on this occasion. Desktop seems the most user friendly. Below's my new repo containing the project I'll be finishing over the weekend.
Link to work: HTML-guided-project1
Today's Progress: I took yesterday off after getting into a bad headspace. Today I've doubled my minimum coding time to make up for it. I'm basically finished with the HTML tutorial I was doing.
Thoughts: However, I reminded myself that originally I decided to pursue it as a way of easing myself back into coding regularly. Instead I procrastinated and this very simple set of prompts and exercises became this white whale in my head. So while I did get value form this tutorial, refreshing some knowhow and learning some new elements and attributes even, I have to ask was it the best use of my time?
Link to work: Here's a link to the repo where I'm storing today's work. Has a link to the tutorial, provided by our very own FCC. https://github.com/MojoBoingo/HTML-guided-project1
Today's Progress: Got back on the FCC curriculum and finished my Picasso Painting.
Thoughts: Wonder if I can do the last exercise AND the project tomorrow? Or at least get started.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Little less than an hour today. Got started on the next module in Responsive Web Design before a friend's situation demanded my attention. Wiped out now, after doing some light studying to try and make up for it.
Thoughts: Not happy with how the day turned out. But it's in the past and I did what I could to maintain the habit.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: Learn Responsive Web Design by Building a Piano 33/33.
Thoughts: Tomorrow I'm going to start recreating the Github Quickstart page for my Technical Documentation project. Going to start waiting till Friday to mass update from Discord to my repo log.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Change of pace, attended an hour long webinar on the Wolfram Plugin for ChatGPT.
Thoughts: At least part of the motivation was avoidance today. Wasn't in the best headspace, but that's becoming rarer and rarer. Was mostly here for the ChatGPT side of things. Having access to the recordings is for each session is nice too.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Started my Technical Documentation Page project today in Responsive Web Design. Today was focused on laying out the bones of the html and making plans to satisfy the user stories.
Thoughts: As I mentioned in an earlier post, I chose the GitHub Quickstart doc to recreate as my project. I'll attempt to style it along the same lines as the actual GitHub page, but not identical. I don't want to inspect any of the original page's code, just try to make mine similar but different.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: After some consideration I've decided to make Friday my day off; Fridays will be for reviewing what I did that week and pushing my logs from local to GitHub.
Thoughts: I really benefit from having one day of not having to worry about it for now. Or that's the theory. Will try it out for three weeks or so.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress:Completely flopped on doing all my push updates yesterday like I said I would, lol. Had a lot of other things on my mind, so I did all that today in addition to doing some more work on my Technical Documentation Page. The bones of the doc page are done, the links are functional. Next comes transferring the content (probably the most tedious part) and then CSS.
Thoughts: Really wanted to enjoy my day off yesterday huh? Might need to just update the log here with the Discord. We'll see how it goes for a few weeks.
Link to work:
Today's Progress:Did the headers and captions for each section today. Wanted to use figure and figcaption elements wrapped around the header's to do it, but that violated one of the conditions of the project (headers needing to be the first child of each main section). So I made them paragraph elements for now. Doesn't feel like I did much, hoping my weekly reset will help with a better frame of mind for tomorrow and I can make some more progress. If anyone has any advice on my project choice or just on motivation, I'd welcome it.
Thoughts: Continued working on my current project in much the same fashion. Although I'm pretty sure I more than met than dedicated one hour, I can't help but feel I'm dragging my feet here. At first I start second guessing myself about my choice of topic before I remember that GitHub docs are, by definition, open source. Though I still wonder if I shouldn't do something more original, like a personal take on a Markdown cheatsheet or something. Might just be intrusive thoughts, been having those lately. Lot of them begin with "I can't.."
Link to work:
Today's Progress:N/A
Thoughts: Had a long overdue conversation with a family member that went pretty well. Took the day off to consider personal matters. Back at it tomorrow. Tomorrow being later today, EST speaking.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: Had a good example of the other side of the "breadth vs. depth" argument today. So I selected a GitHub doc to recreate for my technical documentation project. What I chose was only a section of a tutorial on the use of the website. I've since released that each subsection of what I've selected in fact has it's own navbar and subsections of it's own. I should name this project "matryoshka."
Thoughts: So I'm probably going to scale it back to just one of my twelve sections. I could do the full section I choose originally, and I'd probably benefit from doing it; I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze in this case. This smaller version still teaches me everything this project wants to, and keeps me moving forward. Next SS post will be of the updated code; I've added more but now there's a lot of extraneous mess that needs to go. And some of my headers need to become sections...
Link to work: Didn't snap a SS of this part, check next post.
Today's Progress: Reframed my Technical Documentation project to something not-quite-so-huge. Cleaned it up a lot and pretty much finished with the HTML (aside for some edits to remove a few placeholder things and comments). So tomorrow it should be CSS time!
Thoughts: Really happy about how this went overall, ups and downs. Excited about finishing this project.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Started CSS. Took the opportunity to make the project work for me by creating a sort of CSS boilerplate for myself that I can keep seperately for myself going forward.
Thoughts: So I've been doing this long enough now that I'm starting to get a feel for what kind of programmer I'll end up being. I think I work best when I take the problem, project or end goal I'm working on, break them into segments, and approaching each piece sequentially. So with that in mind, while working on my Technical Documentation project I decided to make it work for me by taking the opportunity to create a sort of CSS boilerplate for myself. So here's project draft 4, styles boilerplate draft 1.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: For now I'm doing all my log updates and then I think I'll copy my project off FCC into VSCode and maybe start a repo for FCC projects. First order of business as far as actual coding is floating my navbar to to top-right of the page and telling it to stay there even while the user scrolls the page. After that there's very little formatting left besides tweaks, so just some styling then I'm done.
Thoughts: Had a nice day off yesterday not once thinking about code (other than floating my navbar a little bit). Just pleasure reading and video games and pro wrestling. The nerd hat trick. Didn't update from here to my repo log; thinking that maybe my brain wants the day off to be very literal, so I'm going to rethink how I do updates on that. My short term goal is to finish Responsive Web Design before the end of May.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: OKAY I missed out yesterday because that was dedicated to doing research on local mechanics because getting my temperature gauge replaced has become unreasonably difficult.
So I tried to make up for that today by doing at least two things. In my Technical Document project, the navbar has been fixed in the top right position, and separated from the main element using padding in CSS so there's no overlap. The navbar will scroll with the page. Still have a media query in mind but holding off on adding that until I'm done done.
Thoughts: So I kinda procrastinated today because I felt guilty for missing yesterday (angst being a famously logical state of mind) and when I finally said "just do a little bit at least, keep the habit going" and resigned to upload my personal boilerplate files to a repo and maybe poke at my project. Instead it turned into almost two hours of work. Didn't even notice the time passing. That feels like a good sign.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Little styling done today. Mostly spent time planning things out while waiting on an appointment that took forever today. Pretty low energy, didn't get much done. Gunna try and shake it off tomorrow
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Spent today wrestling with my navbar; when it comes to actual new code that was written in my project, very little happened here. Anyone who's been keeping up with my log (so everybody, right?) knows that I'm trying to recreate part of GitHub's Quickstart guide as my project, something that was very helpful to me, without taking anything but the content for me to code around. The only bits of code that I should have directly in common with the original document are font-family's, images, and colors.
Thoughts: And it's worth pointing out that the original document includes JavaScript, without which there's some things I can't replicate, as I learned today. I wanted to style my navbar so it behaved much like the original doc's background-color shift on each li when you hover, otherwise simple white text. Except the official doc uses JS to keep the styling in place until the user clicks a another li. To put simply, not something I can replicate within this project. Also on FCC I have to upload a mirror version because it wants the navbar on the left side.
So even if very little code changes today, I felt like it was well spent. I learned things and have a better idea of my finish line for this project, should happen tomorrow or the next day.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Got my navbar to pass muster today but hit a wall trying to style my p elements. Was hoping to finish this project this week but this might hold me back. I'm trying to get my text to appear as a uniform block, with some "padding" (not necessarily the attribute, just in general) on either side with the text in a smooth-edged box. You can easily look to see what I mean.
Thoughts: Bit frustrated, because when someone points out the thing I'm missing I have a hunch I'm going to feel really stupid. C'est la vie. Made a forum post about it and I'll post a link in programming-help but I'll look at replies tomorrow, blegh.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: I cleaned up the styling of my p elements, and struggled valiantly to imitate the numbering used in the GitHub Doc ol but eventually put it in the too hard box and just went with decimal. Added smooth scrolling and wish I had done that in the beginning just for my own sake. Overall everything looks cleaner and I generally neatened up and formatted the code.
Thoughts: When I look over what was asked of me for the project and what I produced, I feel like just maybe I can say I went above and beyond. To what degree is up for debate. Gunna think about it over the weekend and upload the code to my GitHub in full, then probably submit on Monday if I haven't made a good enough case for why I should work on it more. I'll update here when I do. Enjoy your weekend everybody, I plan to.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Today I submitted Technical Document project, and did 35/118 of CSS Skylines.
Thoughts: Not too many, big of a rush today!
Link to work: Tech Doc
Today's Progress: 52/118 of CSS Skylines on FCC.
Thoughts: Did less than an hour day, but I've just been all over the place and can't bring myself to focus anymore. We'll hit it back hard tomorrow.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: N/A
Thoughts: Might do some coding later and it might even go an hour but I'm taking the day off. Half because I feel a buildup of tension and half because I want to remind myself it's okay to do this without punishing myself mentally. So if I code tonight it'll be because I was bored and I wanted to. Which would be delightful actually.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: 118/118 for CSS Skylines today.
Thoughts: Fun exercise, I never want to not use variables again.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: 35/80 for CSS Grid on FCC.
Thoughts: Had a slow start but ended up having a decently productive week. If I pick up the pace just a bit I think I can meet my goal of completing Responsive Web Design by the end of May, or at least close to. Now it's time for me to play Diablo all weekend.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: Finished CSS Grid today and updated the front-end/full stack roadmaps I'm loosely following.
Thoughts: Two projects and two exercises to go!
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Got started on my Product Landing Page project from the FCC curriculum. Laid out all the requirements from the course out, and had the funny realization that I just needed to apply flexbox to something and I could technically submit this completely blank page aside from an email input.
Thoughts: Was some pretty quick work, the rest of my hour and beyond is going to be spent brainstorming on topics.
Link to work:
Today's Progress: Figured out the product part of my Product Landing Page. Today was spent gathering images and looking for a good video overview, and should have involved creating most of the content; unfortunately I neglected to hit the "Save my code" button so instead a lot of it was spent being frustrated as I recreated everything before I did get some work done putting some images into place.
Thoughts: No screenshot today, as there hasn't been much new added besides some images and a little extra styling. But I'll keep it in suspense what my topic is! Because everyone is super invested in the mystery, right? Remember ctrl+s boys and girls.
Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: Not counting today, even though I will probably do some work later. Today is set aside for installing a new GPU and putting it through it's paces. My old one's fan spins up for no reason some time and results in power draws that reboot my system, like to 3k RPM it was ridiculous. Ain't having that.
Thoughts: N/A
Today's Progress: Super frustrating work today. I wrestled trying to get a header and it's img to do what I want for my Product Landing page, and afterwards apparently I forgot everything about working with nav elements.
Thoughts: Couldn't even get mine to move. Needlessly to say I'm feeling pretty frustrated even though I did get some work done. I really don't want to walk away from this unsolved, but I think I need to. I'm just going to keep getting annoyed and by the time I do figure it out it won't even be a relief. So I'm just going to try and relax this weekend, maybe make a forum post about it and update my repo log with the last two weeks.
Link to work: N/A