Posts from 6 January 2015
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Today's partner: Jake
Yes, you read that right. We didn't travel back in time; to the contrary, time keeps marching forward (despite the date overflow back to Jan 1).
Today was the day we put Jonathan's lectures on CSS to use. It was kind of funny; I made sure to do my best to read the lectures for the day last night, and by this morning not only had I been assigned a different partner, but the readings and project were different. It turns out that JT was putting some final touches on his version of the CSS day, and it was (I believe) a much more effective day than what I thought we would have been doing.
On a plus note, today was much more approachable than Backbone has been, for me. Boxing off elements and figuring out style hierarchies is something I'm capable of wrapping my mind around, and despite some of css' foibles it was easily in reach. Per usual, coming up with descriptive names for things was challenging—Jonathan is of the belief that you should add
classes to DOM elements early in the design process, even though we often weren't sure what role something would be playing—but this is one of those times that the cmd-D shortcut, for selecting the next token in the source file, came in handy. You see, any time you decide that something isn't named quite right, you can simply find the first occurrence of that name in your source file and mash cmd-D to select subsequent items, then overwrite them all at once.There's something very satisfying about using eight or more cursors to overwrite some chunks of text. :D
I'm not totally solid on CSS, but I am much more comfortable with it than I ever have been with Backbone. Really, I would not mind doing more of this—converting wireframes into semantic websites—but I know that this is not, by far, my strong suit. After all, I didn't have the skill to actually create a design from scratch, only to make it into semi-sane CSS, and I can't believe that that's a skill that's so much in demand that I can make my mark there.
It's fun, though :)
Tomorrow's the Backbone assessment, and per usual, I feel like I understand it a lot more than I have so far. I still have issues juggling state between all the separate files, but I was able to cobble together 100% passing specs by the 50 minute mark (out of an hour) despite not always knowing exactly what the pattern I was trying to replicate looked like. Looking at the practice solution and my own code side-by-side, there were maybe two redundant lines, and very few differences otherwise.