A little late on this post, but I’ve made a bit of progress and had craploads on my non-web-dev plate, so I’ll take what I can get as long as I’m moving forwards. [I do feel pretty guilty about my rather slack-sidaisical attitude to blogging recently, so expect another blog post later this week… possibly Sunday depending on how busy work is.]

I’m well into my six-week web design evening course. It’s a beginners’ course, so the curriculum is pretty basic, but I’m taking it and trying to go further than what’s required each evening. For example, in the second week we were asked to create a basic four page site and add a photo to one of the pages. I did that and had some time left over so I also included an interactive map [read: Google maps]. [I’d also like to point out that I do this sitting quietly in the corner, and I’m not like shouting about it or anything- at least not in the class, haha!]

Partly for my course, but mostly for my own development, I asked if any of my friends would be willing to be a pretend web development client for me. Two of them volunteered so I’ve been working on simple sites for them- the first being a relatively simple four-page site for an art business, and the second being a portfolio site. I’ll go further into detail on my plans and progress for each one in my next post [when I’ll hopefully have the bones of the four-page site completed; the image gallery page is currently blank, but I’ll be working on that this week]

I’ve finished the Odin Project’s Web Development 101 section on GitHub which I found really helpful! The Odin Project linked to a Code School mini course which made a lot of things ‘click’ for me; prior to that I was using GitHub but having to look up a lot of the commands [like, every time I pushed code…] As simple as it sounds, merging the add and commit commands [using git commit -am “commit message”] was something I didn’t know could be done, but I think I’ll be using it a lot in the future! The course then had us do a bit of the pre-work for the Viking Code School [not too surprisingly the Viking School is a paid web development course from the makers of the Odin Project] it covered most of the same ground as the Code School course pretty quickly to begin with, and then went a bit further, going more in depth with branches and merge conflicts. I was dreading having to deal with merge conflicts [as the pre-work rightly pointed out, being a newbie, seeing a message about a merge conflict is panic-code-red kind of stuff,] but the pre-work explained it clearly and walked us through how to resolve it and merge the branches.

I’m in the final quarter of the Web Development 101 course, and it feels like it’s slowing down a bit. Where before the learning was really focused and fast-paced, it feels like I’m learning bits and pieces of a bunch of different things, but not going as far in depth. The next section is on the Cloud, Hosting, and Software as a Service. I don’t know much about any of those, so I’m looking forward to it!

Hope everyone’s having a good week!