Attending a lecture

Here’s a writeup for hw after attending a lecture:

I’m personally a fan of using Bootstrap. Coding is about instructing computers to perform tasks for us that would take us longer to do. Bootstrap is essentially computer instructions that make other coding tasks easier. Having routine code done ahead of time by Bootstrap enables programmers to work on more specialized tasks, accomplish goals faster, or have more time to spend with the family.

There are a couple areas where Bootstrap isn’t as great: if you’re doing a very simple project or a customized project that doesn’t line up with the functionality Bootstrap comes with you could end up doing more coding. For the majority or projects, however, Bootstrap seems like an effective way to get more accomplished in less time.

I’m still new to Bootstrap though, so knowing what classes to put on which objects can take more time than simply coding the CSS myself until I become more familiar with it. The first week of HTML/CSS gave me mixed feelings: I had practiced it before, so some of it was review, but the weekend’s project required a lot of finesse and fine-tuning which took forever and would’ve probably been easier with Bootstrap.

I watched some video tutorials on Rails before but had literally almost no idea what was happening because I didn’t see the result of the “under the hood” commands. Now that I know what is happening better, Rails seems very handy. The code that we worked on with WEBrick & Sinatra has been incredibly simplified by Rails as it generates a lot of the tedious commands for us (a good way to save typing errors also). The work doesn’t decrease from Rails’ added help, however, because the projects we make just reach into the next level of complexity.

This evening’s presentation started off by explaining when to use:
* a sketch / whiteboard drawing (fast & cheap) vs.
* wireframe (greyscale but shows structure) vs.
* mockup (photoshop detailed) vs.
* rapid prototyping (shows how site would look & is responsive).

The rest of the presentation was essentially going over links to resources. Themes were talked about, as were fonts & style guides. It’ll be helpful to check over the links to see quick guides of the most-used tools, but what I was expecting was coding a project with exclamations of: “Bam! Here it is!” once the Bootstrap was implemented. Met a lot of people though, & the links should help a lot.