Posts from 14 January 2015
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Today was the .css assessment, and after working late (and falling asleep while working a few times) and doing the practice twice, then studying the solutions last night and this morning, I kicked ass.
To summarize: good design often has a logic, and good instructors are consistent, almost without fail. If there are exceptions, they are for a good reason - your instructor is working at the forefront of the field and the rules aren't established, the design language you're working with has some foibles that you have to work around.
In our case, I've managed to pick up on and benefit from the design habits of our CSS specialist, Jonathan, and have slowly been trying to incorporate them into my own design language. For instance, set consistent (and generous) margins/padding, keep visual space symmetrical, tend to favor making item borders on the inside and container borders on the outside, … and so forth. I haven't built all of this into my site yet—it still looks like baby's first webpage, although thankfully not as 90s as all that—but there are a lot of things coming together very quickly.
Case in point: investing in figuring out backbone means that I've basically added three full collections, three full models, and half a dozen views to my app today alone. I also added two utility … packages? files? to my app that enable some neat stuff, one that makes my life easier, and another that enables a pretty cool "live search" feature to the website.
Yeah, it's all pretty silly overall—I'm reinventing the wheel—but I know why and how I'm reinventing the wheel here, which is okay by me.
There's very little of what I'm doing that is really challenging now, which is okay after the weekend. To use a workout metaphor, this is my plateau, where I'm consolidating gains before looking for more of a training effect. Again, I'm okay with that.
Meanwhile, I'm able to explain to a lot of people what their code is doing wrong, or able to sort through arbitrary code and understand it pretty idiomatically; I'm much more confident with
gitand amaliasing my most common commands regularly, and can find my way around Atom like nothing.Wow, they have taught us something. :P