Father Stretch My Patience Pt. 1?—?My Coding Bootcamp Experience, Part 8
Christian Chavarro
Senior Software Engineer at Autolist | Senior Full Stack Engineer | Senior Frontend Engineer | React, TypeScript, Next.js, GraphQL | Hot Wheels collector
This post was initially published on Medium on June 15, 2016
HTML and CSS are not inherently difficult, at least not when stacked against the trials and tribulations I’ve been put through with Ruby. However, they are, above all else, tedious. For reference, here’s a list of things that you can accomplish in five hours in any given day:
- Clean your house.
- Write a 2,500 paper on procrastination…eventually.
- Create a single table with a blue border.
Fortunately, the Ironhack staff had the wisdom to ship Josh away on ‘vacation’ for two weeks, leaving us under the guiding hands and infinite wisdom of Nizar. He would be our coding Buddha, showing us the light of sound coding principles while avoiding a dumpster fire in our CSS files.
Day 16 — Day 20
Seeing as how most of these two weeks generally consisted of creating website designs, which was a matter of determining what rows, containers, divs, etc. go where and with what attributes, I’m going to condense my overview into a single section as opposed to individual days.
Right away, I knew I was going to like Nizar. His mighty beard was thick and hearty like a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, and although he spoke at a much quicker pace than Josh, his words were carefully chosen and reflected his 10 years of experience in the game. This isn’t to say anything negative towards Josh, who, regardless of the jokes made in these posts, I still respect tremendously. Not as much as Faraz, though. More important than his knowledge, however, was the fact that Nizar kicked off the first lesson by offering chocolate to people who asked the best questions about HTML. You have to understand, I’ll do a backflip for a dollop of butter. The offer of free chocolate only serves to reveal the cavernous depths of my inner depravity.
Needless to say, I got a piece of chocolate.
Throughout the first lecture, Nizar did a few things that left me more confused than the fact that Josh has friends. Namely, he had a habit of skipping every single slide that mentioned the best practices to follow when using HTML and CSS. What, were those Downloadable Content Add-Ons that we could only get by preordering? Regardless, we ended up learning what we had to learn through tons of practice. What did we learn, you might ask? Stuff like positioning items on an HTML page, which turned out to be the kind of stuff that made me want to position myself back home. It wasn’t so much a matter of trial by error so much as it was moving elements pixel by pixel until I was able to turn in what I thought was a solid B- effort. We were also taught about the difference between relative, absolute, and fixed locations, with the latter being described as ‘if you had a slice of pizza on the screen with a fixed location, no matter how much you scroll or wherever you go, pizza will always follow you’. That heartfelt tale would have put a tear in ol’ Papa John’s eye.
These two weeks allowed us to get pretty intimate with divs, which is where most of our website elements live. We quickly learned, however, that this makes for the creation of dozens upon dozens of divs, and that a broken layout could be attributed to a missing </div> tag. In a complex layout, looking for that missing tag is like sweeping an entire football stadium in search of a single gum wrapper. The concept of responsive design, which lets developers create websites that adapt to different devices and resolutions, was also discussed and practiced. The biggest problem associated with this on my end was the need to create grids that are very dependent on the number of pixels you specify in the code. If some elements weren’t working, we were asked to add some extra pixels to it, which is the coding equivalent of spraying a child with WD40 whenever they start acting up. Overall, though, I was able to learn to do something that I never thought I’d be able to do in a matter of months, let alone two weeks. Learning had finally become fun.
Day 21
And then Josh came back. With the next full-time cohort gearing up to begin in the following week, I walked into Building to see Josh’s smiling face awaiting me. I can promise you with the utmost sincerity that I did not smile back. This was like going from a Red Gyrados to a Magikarp with a missing eye and the inability to use Splash. At least the learning was fun while it lasted. To make things worse, he assigned us an all-day exercise where we had to build a movie trivia quiz by combining Sinatra, Ruby, CSS, and HTML and using TDD to make sure everything was working properly. TDD? I hardly remembered what that stood for, let alone how to use it. I’ve gotten used to the feeling by now, though, and I was able to climb over the wall of hopelessness by piecing the project together one piece at a time, starting with the concepts we hadn’t gone over in a few weeks and finishing up with the front end design, relying heavily on Bootstrap to ensure that my page wouldn’t make anyone physically ill upon visiting.
This exercise ushered in a new phase of the Ironhack program, which was made clear when Josh told us to add this and future projects to our development portfolio. We had finally gone from building programs that lived in our terminals and non-functional layouts to actual websites that people could use. With us getting our hands dirty with Javascript next week, it was only a matter of time before my final project would start taking shape. I can’t wait.
Posts about my Ironhack journey thus far:
Ironhack-ing Away — The Prelude