#idm701

I can safely say that pretty much everything I learned in this class was something new to me. I never really thought of myself as someone who would ever learn to do even the most basic coding. "Computers make websites with magic and pixie dust," went my line of thinking. The idea of even breaching the subject was so completely imposing.

I mean, obviously I had seen lines of code before. But I guess I always imagined that a developer built a website the same way an artist draws a painting. I think it's really interesting that a website is essentially built of tiny instructions you give to the computer.

The artist analogy still holds up, I suppose. But it is a vastly different set of tools serving both function and form at the very same time. That has been something I've found difficult to wrap my brain around.

A lot this hasn't come easily. Learning to see the basic building blocks of a website has been a real challenge for a luddite like me. I think it's significant that I can look at the code for a site and see the basic structural elements that put it all together. It helps a lot to see tags and elements that were heretofore unknown to me like header and footer (like I said, I was pretty much starting from zero) and recognizing them as pieces of the whole. It might not be a lot, but at least I have a foundation for understanding.

I mean I still find the Bertrand Russell logic-ese of the PHP delimeter completely impenetrable, but I've found myself kind of fascinated by the straightforwardness of that logic all the same. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do, not necessarily what you want it to do.  

The world of software developers is full of variables not only inside the code but also its interpretes. The normal perception is that all developers are those “creppy" guys inside of their basement juggling with their computers and inventing new weird stuff however developers could be more than that depending of their personality, knowledge, style, or even nationality. That’s my case.

When I started this course (late), after my first class I thought that probably the entire semestre will be learning again what I already knew and that’s what happened. Even though I learned new stuff in this course. Is always interesting see how someone with more knowledge than you and more experience deal with the same problems that you could have faced in the past. 

Every single developer resolve problems in a different way but is true that probably one of those solutions is better than the other. In this course that’s one of the things that I learned and it’s very valuable. Learn how to write code not only to satisfy client’s need but also write good quality code that really makes an efficient task.

http://joyreactor.com/post/476665

Before I attended the Production Tools course this term, I was freaked out by programming classes. I had no idea whether I could handle programming language since it is all Greek to me. However, things turn out to be better than I thought. After taking the class, I have learned how to tackle problems by myself and I have got to say Google is a wonderful teacher in writing a program. Certainly there is no way for me to simply copy the answer, but I could learn from some similar samples then figure out my own.

Taking a sole course was absolutely not enough for me to become an programming expert. The biggest problem was I had to know all the basic programming languages and tools in a short time. Programming was difficult even for students who spent years taking professional IT courses at university. What I could do is to take more practice by myself. 

I have learned HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript so far. After this semester, I found  although different programming languages follow a variety of syntax rules, they have something in common. Instead of covering all the demands for web development, these programming languages focus on solving problems of some aspects. In other words, they are designed for different purposes, and all of them possess their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, HTML is used to build the basic structure of a web page while CSS is more for the decoration style; JavaScript facilitates the execution by the client side, while PHP is typically implemented on the server side. Thus programmers have to use these tools proficiently and combine their virtues for web development.  

In the Production Tools class we have learned the technology used on the world-wide-web to create great websites. Some of the software techniques and the emerging technologies really caught my attention.

  One of the most significant things that I learned was Responsive Web Design, this is a great approach to provide an optimal user experience. I never really liked the mobile versions for web pages, especially those that didn’t have the option to see the Desktop Version or the Full Website. Sometimes the mobile versions instead of help you make more difficult and complicated the navigation due there are elements that are missing. For that reason I think Responsive Web Design is a great technique that makes easy to see any website through multiple devices.

  I think you start appreciate a good website and great design when you have dealt writing and editing code including PHP and JavaScript and you realize that is not easy as you might think. PHP is used almost exclusively for web development and for that reason we learned the basics in this class, as well as JavaScript to add some interactivity to the webpages. We also looked the new things of HTML5, like the tags that make easy to include multimedia on the web, and the tags elements to design the content of documents. All of this helps to create a better user experiences on the world-wide-web.

Throughout my first semester as an Interactive Digital Media student at Centennial College no other course has frustrated and terrified me more than my Production Tools 1 class and attempting to comprehend the vast and seemingly endless programming tools. If I were to be completely honest about what specifically surprised me or changed my opinion concerning the software and developer sphere, I would have to say everything. Absolutely everything! But in order to properly complete this particular assignment I will narrow it down to a few points that stood out throughout my introduction to web production.

Firstly, I have become rather frustrated and surprised by the process of writing program markup language. When writing the specific code for HTML 5, CSS, and PHP, one simple spelling mistake or misplaced tags or symbols can throw off an entire website. As I have written many essays in previous years of my education I have always been easily forgiven for simple and common spelling mistakes. However, in the programming realm finding and fixing one simple spelling error can sometimes be quite a nightmare. I came to this realization while attempting to complete my last assignment, in which I misspelled one command and my entire page refused to work properly and it took quite a while to find what the actual problem was. This has made me even more cautious when typing out script for my assignments, as typing the code out correctly the first time is much easier then attempting to find and fix such a small and hidden problem.

Secondly, as the end of the semester approaches, I have come to realize how much I miss using HTML markup language to create a web page. I thought this particular markup language was difficult to understand at first but now that I have been introduced to PHP, JavaScript as well as Word Press, HTML seems like a breeze. As well, I was quite surprised at how PHP and HTML code are so similar but serve a very different process concerning server side scripting languages and client side scripting. The slight differences between these two ways of programming are still quite puzzling to me, but I am learning, slowly but surely.

Before taking the Production Tools course, I had never heard of and therefore had no idea what "responsive design" was. But it turns out I had been seeing it in action pretty much every time I browsed the internet on a mobile device. Nowadays it's everywhere, but unless you know what it is, it's unlikely you're going to realize when you're looking at it.

If you were to take a webpage (a newspaper article, for example) as it appeared on your desktop browser and display it as is on a smartphone, it would not make for a very comfortable viewing experience. Everything would be so small as to be unreadable, and to make it readable, you would have to do a lot of zooming and scrolling, which involves a lot of tapping and pinching with your fingers.

This is where responsive design comes in. The term refers to the visual reformatting of web content for a variety of devices (i.e. different screen sizes). Good responsive design would take all of the content on that newspaper webpage and display it on your smartphone in a way that's readable and easy to navigate. This is done through CSS. Thanks to a CSS module known as Media queries, the style of your HTML markup can be rendered differently depending on the size of your screen. Such user-experience oriented web design has become very important now that mobile browsing is much more common around the world.

Before starting Production Tools 1, I had already known a super small bit of HTML coding; pretty much your basic of basics. This class taught me knew terms I hadn’t known or understood properly before along with a couple of other coding languages that correspond and can enhance an HTML code.

By taking this class it had helped me understand coding languages and read website codes and actually be able to understand it. I have certainly been looking at things different and have given programmers more props than I did before. There’s so much code that goes into developing something, it sometimes is just boggling to even read.

Programming is something a lot of us should grasp. People can benefit a lot just by understanding it. With it we can create websites, designs and tweak programs. Not that it’s uberly important but it’s like a little handy tool.

Another thing that I've learned is that different codes only work on certain browsers… or all, depending. I think I enjoy HTML and CSS the most… it’s a little less confusing for me to understand and remember how to properly use and write it. I would actually like to learn more attributes and features that it can offer.

One of the random things I had learned, sort of a technique was ‘rubber ducking’. I found myself calling the teacher over a few times and asking, “where did I go wrong?” as I asked the question going over my code again I then realized where I went wrong and that I actually didn’t need the help I called for in the first place. It’s a good technique that can also be used outside of programming to help solve our little errors.

   As the term comes to an end, it is now probably a good time to take a step back and look at what we’ve learned so far. In our production tools class we have spent the past few months learning how to use HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript (among other things).  I could try to pretend like all of these different coding languages work exactly like I expect them to, but that would be a complete lie. One thing in particular that has completely changed the way that I look at the web and development is the importance of responsive design.

   Responsive design is the idea of creating a web page that changes depending on what type of device you are using to view the content. Before our class, I never really thought too much about how bad some things tend to look when experienced on a phone’s browser. It was just one of those things you deal with. In the back of my mind I was under the impression that it would require hundreds of programmers and a ridiculous budget to make a website responsive. For this reason I never really got mad or upset when dealing with a terrible user experience on a mobile browser. After walking through the steps required to make a page work responsive, however, I now understand that if a site is not responsive it is due to a huge oversight or laziness. If I was able to make a barebones website into something responsive, then surely a large company with huge resources should have no excuse for not making sure their resources are responsive. I will certainly acknowledge that a large website can be a ridiculous complicated and intricate beast (another thing we have learned all too well in this class). That being said, when we consider the amount of users who are currently using mobile browsers to access online content, to keep up this trend for much longer would surely be a fools errand.