Ever Wonder Where You Start in Programming? Look at Myspace and Wordpress
An Intro to Coding class is standard practice before signing up for a bootcamp. Your social media practice might have already prepared you.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like a teacher’s pet.
There were times early in my education where I was always the kid with the right answer, but toward the end of my education I grew dissatisfied with the system as a whole and I let my participation suffer.
Imagine then, my surprise when I showed up for Eleven Fifty’s Intro to Coding day and became the student that the teacher called on when he needed something explained and no one was answering. It was weird, but exciting to be in that position again.
There was a reason for my preparation for this Intro to Coding day. Kenzie Academy had a similar introduction course, but it was online, self-taught. I had just so happened to complete that introduction a week prior (while sitting at the lovely Calvin Fletcher’s Coffee). These intro courses seem to be pretty standard as far as coding programs go. Schools need a way to assess the markers of a good developer and the potential students get to learn a few things along the way. After going through these two separate courses, I wanted to take a moment and let people know that if you knew how to organize your Top 8 Friends in 2006, you might be farther along than you already believe.
1.) It’s All About Tags
Both of these intro courses — and most ‘intro to programming’ courses I would assume — focused exclusively on HTML and CSS. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and alongside CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), makes up the majority of the internet as we know it today. I assume that intro classes start here because in terms of a language that your mind has to decipher and learn to “speak,” the syntax is pretty simple and revolves around “tags.”
<this> is a tag, but this is not. HTML depends on these carrots <,> to help your computer and browser understand what it wants to do. Everything that you type inside of those brackets is understood depending on the type of tag you use. For example, if I typed: <h1>HELLO</h1> your browser reads “the person writing this wants the characters ‘HELLO’ to be displayed as Header text.” There are many, many HTML tags that all tell the computer to display different elements when they’re used, you’re marking up the page with tags to get your point across.
The reason that this came easily to me was my background in blogging, writing, and marketing. Sites like WordPress and other CMSes are built to make writing content possible without having to intimately know HTML, but sometimes it’s easier to go in and add those tags yourself. Along the way, I picked up a few tricks for how to add tags and line breaks and <a href> elements when the WordPress text editor was acting up. While WordPress was that teacher for me, a lot of millennials my age got their start using these same principles to style their MySpace pages. Once you get an idea for how the browser needs to be spoken to using these tags, you begin to pick up a way of speaking. It’s not dissimilar from learning a spoken language, and it’s really fun once it starts to click.
2.) Close Every Door You Open
The second biggest point to be taken from these introduction days is that every open door needs to be closed. In the example of HTML tags, they work in pairs. An <h1>TAG WON’T FUNCTION WITHOUT A CORRESPONDING</h1> tag on the other end. Without that closing tag, the entire page wouldn’t render correctly because the browser would be waiting to see where your command to change the style of text ends. As a novice who has only dabbled in the most basic of JavaScript, I can already attest to how quickly a block of code will fall apart if one single comma is out of place.
If you’re getting into the swing of things like I was at the Eleven Fifty introduction day, you start to automatically close tags before you add content inside of them. If I was writing an <h1> tag, I’d find myself with something like this:
<h1>
(empty space)
</h1>
Since the class was being led by a teacher and he was working through things sequentially, it helped to already have the tag closed while I waited for the content that he wanted us to add in between. I’m hoping to get myself to add closing tags reflexively whenever they’re opened so that I can focus on the more important bits of programming. A few of my developer friends have discussed anecdotes of them spending hours parsing through dense and non-functional code only to find a single character was wrong. I know I won’t be able to avoid all of those instances, but thinking about it now can’t hurt.
3.) References Are Oh So Important
The final big thought that I took away from these introduction to programming classes was the way in which computer languages reference information that they need to accomplish their tasks. After finishing the HTML and CSS courses, it made sense why they are taught alongside each other. On its own, HTML is pretty basic as far as formatting goes. It’s only when you start to add in some CSS that things look like a modern website.
The thing is, HTML and CSS are two separate languages. (At least to my knowledge as a novice at the moment) You can’t drop CSS coding elements into an HTML page and have it work without telling the computer how everything is connected. The way this is accomplished is by building your CSS sheet with the format and style that you like, and then referencing that sheet at the top of your HTML page. When your browser loads that HTML, it reads your CSS reference and thinks “Oh cool. This person wants the tags to look a little different than how I would normally display them, so whenever I see an h1 tag, I’m going to reference the CSS to see what it should look like.”
Seeing the end result of these two languages working in tandem to build a functional page was really enlightening and exciting on these introduction courses. Going forward, I can only assume that this last revelation is going to be the most widely used concept for how to build in JavaScript; referencing tags and sheets to help build the main element. But, that’s just a hunch. We’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out when my classes begin in August.
For now I’ve got a few books to read and some online learning to do to get ready for things that kick off next month. I’ll be posting a little more frequently now that I’m settled in at my new place of living. Hope to see you back here for more!
