MAMA WE MADE IT!!
In the wise words of Post Malone “They said I wouldn’t be nothing
Now they always say congratulations” I am popping bottles tonight ya’ll. We have reached the first checkpoint in the Coding Academy, and what do you know? I AM STILL ALIVE! Okay so technically we have only gotten through the first four weeks of a nine month course but for me to still be here and feel confidence in all my projects thus far makes me feel like I’m on top of the world! This past month has not been easy by any means, but with a little bit of grit and determination; I have successfully managed a hectic work schedule like a thousand hours of homework and some personal issues and managed to come out head above water. Ive learned to fall in love with coding and creating new things every single day. So far everybody out there thats worried about, since I have been MIA, I just want to reassure you that I am alive and thriving!
- Describe one thing you learned in class today.
More than anything that I learned this week in class, I learned that people/employers/teachers in this profession actually care about your well-being. I had the misfortune of going through a tough personal issue and Professor Robin made an effort to make me feel genuinely better! I cant stress enough how thankful I am because in passed experiences with employers and educators alike I felt like a burden when coming to somebody with an issue I was dealing with. This makes me really excited to start a profession in the tech field because I feel like it will be really down to earth and and actually involve human emotion! Theres nothing worse than an employer who doesn’t care about his employees and only about his riches. So I learned that people actually genuinely care about each other in this field!
2. What’s the difference between a relative, fixed, absolute and statically positioned element?
So when speaking about all the words in the above question, the thing that they all have in common is that they describe types of positioning. Static is the default value and it makes items appear in the order they are received in the document. Relative is a position that is relative to its normal position. Absolute means that the element is “positioned absolutely to its first positioned parent”. When speaking about fixed it means the element’s position is related to the browsers window. Sticky, means that the elements position is based on the users scroll position. The amount position elements can be overwhelming at times, but this is a continuous learning cycle so just know that new information never stops coming in.
3. Describe pseudo-elements and discuss what they are used for.
A pseudo-element is a keyword added to a selector that lets you style a specific part of the selected element. They can be used to select certain lines in all the <p> tags just to give a small example. Also when paired with the hover attribute it allows the text or whatever tag your using to interact when the mouse directly hovers over the pseudo-element.These are pretty cool because it was the first time I got to see how something interacts when hovered over a webpage.
4. What are some of the “gotchas” for writing efficient CSS?
Using efficient css selectors is a good start! Use as many and as specific selectors to know exactly what you are selecting to style! Its good practice to avoid universal selectors that select everything at once. You can see how this would cause a headache when trying to style one specific item on the entire web page. The more specific you can be the better. If you think Im repeating the same thing over and over again, you’re right, and DO IT!
5.Can you explain the difference between coding a web site to be responsive versus using a mobile-first strategy?
Have you ever wondered how a website renders differently on your phone than it does on a tablet or a laptop? Yeah probably not, but I am here to tell you that there is actually quite the process for a website to achieve responsiveness. “Omar what the heck does responsiveness mean?” I knew this question was coming sooner or later. For a website to be responsive it has to respond to the screen size trying to load it in at many different screen sizes. A helpful thing to remember in this situation is to build for the smaller screens and work your way all the way up to monster monitors.This is what we call a mobile-first strategy, code is much less likely to break if it nows how to act when you give it a tiny screen to operate from.
6.Have you played around with the new CSS Flexbox or Grid specs? What can you say about them?
I LOVE GRID AND FLEXBOX! Ever since being introduced to these two new concepts it has been love at first site…….see what I did there? But really love at first sight is an understatement. I can position anything I want exactly where I want them. It has taken me form guessing and a bunch of trial and error to an educated guess and much less trial and error. I bet ya’ll expected me to say that there wouldnt be any trial and error huh? I know by know yall know that the world does not work that way and life is not that easy! I love how flexbox helped me in styling a nav bar on my most recent project. The way grid acts a huge layout map with every pixel containing coordinating coordinates. Makes my job a lot easier.
7.Can you give an example of an @media property other than “screen”?
There are four main properties of @media. They are screen, print, all, and speech. With the @media it is easy to combine them and change the layout for when you open the page in a smaller window. Using the print property you can even change the way the webpage is going to look when you print it out. There is a lot of ways to customize everything on a webpage and I continue to urge ya’ll to follow me until the finish line!
