Day 4 — Flexbox
We received the last morning orientation today with some notes about diversity and inclusion. Got some statistics about the demographics of the tech industry and some of the initiatives at trying to make opportunities available to a wider group. All really good things.
In the morning, we talked about using float (old way) and flexbox (new and better way) to design page layout. The morning session on flexbox was confusing for me. To begin with, I’m not that interested in the front-end graphical design. I thought things made sense. Then we had a few pair programming activities and it became crystal clear that there were large gaps in my understanding. Every time I made a change to my CSS file, I got unexpected results. A clear indication of an opportunity to learn!
So I kept working. Trying different things. Observing results. Reading documentation. Asking questions. Talking with my partner.
Over lunch, I constructed a few small examples on my own and continued to play with it. I think it was at that moment I realized that I had a fundamental misunderstanding about using flexbox and what element to make display: flex. The key for me was to think about the rows in the design and not the columns. Of course, later on I realized that I could use flex-wrap and flex-basis to handle those cases. This is especially useful if the HTML elements you are working with don’t have an existing container.
The afternoon project went much more smoothly. Once I fixed the misunderstanding, more things seemed to fall into place. I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert by and any means. But at least I’m a little more confident. Finished the afternoon project in about an hour. Here’s a small screenshot of the design with three main sections: the top header, the articles column on the left and the aside on the right.

We received our first weekly project. Essentially a three-page website design. I typed up the HTML and got started on the styling. Worked on it for a few hours. Then worked on it a few hours more tonight. I’m pretty much done with it. Just need to tweak a few things.
This opens up the weekend for me to work ahead and revise my notes on flexbox. Even though front-end design isn’t really my thing, I feel like I should at least make a nice outline for myself of how things work. I’m also planning on working on my Number Four website and trying to visualize the different paths back to the number four. I also have the Instacart data that was released to play with.
And the British Open is this weekend, so I may catch a bit of that if there is time… :-)
