Lauren's Skillcrush Adventure

I can’t believe I’m on my last Skillcrush course: JavaScript & jQuery! These past couple of months have really flown. Last week, we spent a few days going over the wonders of Git and GitHub. While I haven’t mastered it yet, the introduction was super helpful and I anticipate I will be using it much more in the weeks, months, and years to come.

I made it through RWD! I can’t believe it’s already been 3 weeks since I started. Coding sure has been fun to learn and makes the hours fly by. In fact, I spent a good chunk of my afternoon/evening yesterday re-coding my portfolio site using the Bootstrap framework. It’s far from perfect but I am pretty satisfied with it now that it looks better across all device sizes. Bootstrap is great because you can structure your site with the grid system but it automatically stacks the columns once you hit a certain breakpoint, making it flow well from iPhone to tablet to desktop! I wanted anyone pulling my site up on their phone to be able to scroll through the content seamlessly. Bootstrap for the win!

(via GIPHY)

I’ve completed 1/3 of my responsive web design course. I must say it’s a little more difficult than I anticipated! The concepts are not too complex, but it does require some thought when thinking about things such as text size and “breaking points” for various screen sizes and creating media queries for each. I didn’t have much trouble with the class assignments this week, but still not entirely sure how to apply RWD to my new portfolio site. My goal is to make my portfolio site responsive by the end of this course! 

In the meantime, I decided to go ahead and start on my JavaScript course because I am just anxious to learn more about it and how to implement it into my web designs! So far, I am really enjoying it. I got pretty far in to the (free) JavaScript course on Codecademy.com a while back so at least it’s familiar to me now. However, I do really like how Skillcrush explains concepts and breaks things down into bite-sized pieces that make information easy to absorb and digest!

I’ve had a week-long break after completing my HTML/CSS course and officially begin learning responsive web design on Monday! I took a preliminary peek at the lessons today because I am just so excited to get started. There is so much more to web design for mobile devices than I imagined. One topic I’m looking forward to learning more about is the concept of “Mobile First” design.

Some of the touted benefits of working within this mindset include placing importance on a simple, clean layout. Also, starting web design with mobile in mind enables designers and developers to work their way up vs. what is called “graceful degradation,” which is a fancy-sounding term meaning starting with the desktop version and taking elements away or formatting them differently for small screen sizes. This can sometimes lead to a less visually-pleasing mobile design.

However, if you just Google the topic, you will find plenty of articles that already focus on the question of “what’s next?” There is a new school of thought that is taking “mobile first” to the next level, or what’s called “authentically mobile.” Being authentically mobile not only entails placing visual display and user experience on mobile devices first, but also focuses on data collection in order to better understand customers and interact on an entirely different level with them through a web app. Big data is another topic that I find super interesting and it definitely overlaps with the progressive approach to mobile, but it’s probably a discussion best saved for another blog post entirely. Some great reads:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/17/mobile-first-but-whats-next/

I’m a little late in the Tumblr game here since I actually started learning to code a few weeks ago, but going forward I’d like to document my experience going through Skillcrush’s new Front-End Web Developer Career Blueprint. I’ll back up a little by briefly explaining why I’m in this program.

Why? My husband and I recently moved across the country, from Texas to Ohio in fact. He got a new job and I left my previous (relatively safe, secure) role at an energy company and began looking around up here. I quickly realized the job market is still not the most encouraging, even for someone who has an MBA and a few years of solid work experience under her belt. Job hunting has actually become my “job” at the moment. That and coding. Through my daily job search looking for marketing-related roles, I noticed that many companies are starting to list variations of tech skills in the job description/requirements. As a millennial, I’ve always stayed on top of tech trends, naturally. However, what I lacked was a technical understanding of how to translate ideas using coding to create a product that you see on your computer or mobile device.

Enter Skillcrush. I’ve been following this company for a while now on Twitter and considered enrolling in their career blueprint programs for quite a while. With a full-time job and grad school, I just didn’t think I could add coding to the mix. Now that I’m “fun-employed” (trying to stay positive!) I decided what better way to spend my free time than learning new, useful skills?

What. As I mentioned, after reviewing all of Skillcrush’s blueprint options, I decided to pursue front-end web development, which for the sake of this program includes HTML, CSS, Git, Responsive Web Design JavaScript and jQuery. 

So far I have just completed the first module of the program: HTML/CSS. The program includes straight-forward, easy-to-understand videos from the company’s founder, Adda Birnir. Additionally, there are tons of resources and explanations to expand on each topic that’s covered, small “challenges” along the way that allow you to demonstrate what you learned, and a final project at the end, which is launching a website. 

I must say that buying a domain and web hosting service and seeing my hand-coded HTML site out there for the public to see is exhilarating and so rewarding! I took a sample website design from a Photoshop file and converted it by hand into code. Skillcrush provided the example site to give students a starting point and then encourages us to tweak it to make it our own. My site is obviously a huge work in progress, but I’m still very proud of it! 

Take a peek! www.LaurenHitte.com