Learning a lot = Getting lost a lot…

Aliana Melendez
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

So this is the beginning of week 2 and everyone was not kidding when they said it would be a rollercoaster of getting it and then not getting it. I thought it would be similar to when I was in college, but it’s not…at all!

There’s also a lot of new information being thrown at me every day. Some of it I’ve heard of or have maybe come across in someone else’s blog or question on a forum. Other things are all new ways of thinking or concepts I didn’t know existed.

So what have I learned? What’s blown my mind so far?

Bootstrap for CSS! Wow. This is for sure one of my favorite things (at least for now). The world of CSS and HTML are overwhelming. There are so many attributes to keep track of, which at first seem intuitive. When you look at

body { 
font-size: 18px;
color: SteelBlue;
font-family: Candara, Calibri, sans-serif;
}

You can infer what’s going on; font-size is being set, color is some shade of blue. Cool. Except for when you type in a slightly different word that you thought must be an attribute and it’s not. I originally entered font: sans-serif; but that’s not it, it’s font-family:. Trying to break something up into columns on a page? Get ready to spend time Googling and refreshing a browser. This is why bootstrap blew my hair back. You just copy and paste it in and you’re good to go. It’s like the greatest gift someone else could give you when starting. Your beginner sites/ projects don’t have to look like 1998, but can be modern and tasteful.

Another few fun ones were attr_reader, attn_writer and code pairing. To someone who’s been coding for some time, they’re fundamentals, but when you learn to use them they’re pretty impressive little tools. Getters and Setters take time to write, even though they’re simple. They also take up a lot of space. These are significantly shorter.

Where am I feeling lost? Rails. We made a new rails project and started poking around and the amount of folders, files, filenames and moving parts are all over the place. Some things I get and make sense, others I’m just accepting as fact and hope to understand more later on. Let’s see how I feel about this in a few days.

Aliana Melendez

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