The Fall Paradox
I think it is kind of ironic that Fall is my favorite season. It kicks off the best time of the year starting with Halloween and ending with my Birthday on January 7th, which is only a week removed from New Year’s and two from Christmas. In between all this comes Thanksgiving, the official kickoff for the moment when reality starts to warp and we’re filled with food, nostalgia. and jolly festivities for weeks on end. Despite all these fantastic things I find that my true happiness from fall, derives from the mass death of all the leaves. It isn’t until right before the trees are barren and boring when the leaves are clinging to the last moments of their lives, that we see all the amazing colors explode across the scene. There is something about the frigid and damp air on my skin and watching millions of leaves approach their demise that makes me feel at peace and extremely euphoric. I dream of a day that web-development offers me a chance to relocate to a place with copious trees and beautiful scenes. As the leaves begin to turn, I have started the second to last course in my journey. My classmates and I are officially learning about some back-end stuff, including but not limited to servers, and databases. The atmosphere is starting to get exciting as we get closer to accumulating all the skills to our repertoire that are required in order to boast the title of full-stack Web Developer.
As I start to get some experience with code editors and from different sources, I have found myself to become a convincingly more organized person. From the bookmark bar on my browser, to the folder format I have seemingly adopted on Visual Studio Code. Having some sort of organization is essential due the amount of task and clutter we have to navigate through on a daily basis. When I am coding I like to leave an adequate amount of comment lines, and spacing. I like to make sure that all my elements are properly nested within each other, so that everything looks nice and neat when scrolling through my code. The progress I have made this passed year in terms of my organization is impeccable and I look forward to growing in that area in hopes that it extends to other areas in my life.
Whenever I decide to finally make a project, or website, understand that I have already been thinking about it internally for quite some time now. I usually like to imagine what it is going to look like, after I decide what I want it to do of course. I like to sketch out the design in a notebook or on my whiteboard and try to make a direct connection to code in order to make my design come to life. I then start thinking about what part of my page is going to take advantage of some JavaScript, so that I make sure to assign some easy to remember Id’s and classes. I then like to start the coding process with and acute attention to detail to ensure my site is not only functional but very appealing.
Being in a tech field, more than likely means that the learning process never ends. Odds are that you will run into a problem that you cannot solve or crack. Another paradox is that you learn to succeed only after you have experienced failure. All you can do is learn from past mistakes ,grow ,and expand your knowledge so that next time we are prepared to take the task head on. Whenever I run into this problem I find that the internet is my best friend. It takes literal seconds to have all the information in the world at your disposal thanks to Google. Google is so extremely amazing that I am sure if there isn’t one right now, there will be a tutorial video on how to perform open heart surgery in the near future. I also like to have a bookmark folder that has a collections of articles I deemed useful.
After declaring yourself a developer most of your problems have to arise from coding, so it’s obvious that most of your solutions come from the same source. However it is important to be able to solve problems that don’t involve technical solutions. Now while I have not solved as many problems as Dr. Phil persay, I have faced my fair share of real life problems. I find that slowing down and thinking of everything from a logical standpoint has been my best friends. Getting back into school and finding some direction in my life was a problem that I faced head on. Gaining some newfound dreams and a life passion in the process has been the direct result of me going out on a limb and trying something completely different when I enrolled into a coding bootcamp.
While my experience in Text Editors is limited, I know that I like free, so that makes Visual Studio Code king for me. Not only is it free, but it is backed by a tech giant in Microsoft. There is tons of shortcuts and tech support that VS offers. There are many extensions that can be downloaded that range from a live server, or multiple other ones that personalize the way your Text editor looks. Maybe one day when I have felt my way around the developing world even more I will have a new favorite. Until then VS is extremely efficient and easy to use.
Keeping up with the latest trends is a must in the ever changing landscape of web development. Change is the only constant and that is no different when it comes to what is “in”. One way I like to remain in the loop is by following differnerent developers across social media that like to express what they are working on. I also like to read all the technology related articles in my news app. I was probably the last generation that actually had to play outside before tablets and cellphones took over the youth’s lives. So I am extremely thankful for technology and I love keeping up with the latest and greatest. One thing I have found myself kind of addicted to, has been watching a day in the life of a developer videos on YouTube. It just drives my passion and determination to one day work as a dev.
