A pause in my usual routine to take a look at where I’m at and where I’d like to be. It’s been quite the ride diving back into HTML and CSS and dipping my toe into Javascript.
But first, a little context 🔗
I plead guilty to starting new journals despite having a stack of many mostly unused journals. There’s something irresistible about starting anew. I can’t help but think, “This time will be different. I’m leaving behind all my baggage and I’ll just start being the person I’ve wanted to be all along.”
It’s idealism in its fullest expression. Like I can just erase the past. Like I can just skip the hard parts. Like I can just get fit in 30 days with this one-of-a-kind, totally original, “guaranteed to work or your money back” program.
Spoiler alert: You can’t erase the past. You can’t skip the hard parts. Those programs don’t work (it’s not you, it’s them).
The web design journey, so far 🔗
I began with acceptance. I accepted that I am definitely a beginner when it comes to Javascript. And I accepted that I am not that far beyond an advanced beginner with HTML and CSS because I found myself referencing MDN every 10 minutes or so.
I looked into what would realistically fit into my schedule. On average, I figured I could guarantee about two hours four days a week. (I give myself Sundays off of everything work-related and the other two days are already booked.)
In an effort to embrace a beginner’s mind, I invested some of that limited time into free resources like web.dev courses and freeCodeCamp instead of investing all of that time into cobbling something mediocre together.
Since deciding to dedicate myself to web design about a month a half ago now…
- I’ve earned the freeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design Certification.
- I am through 6 of 21 web.dev’s Learn HTML! course pages and 9 of the 29 Learn CSS! course pages.
To no one’s surprise, learning web design is still a work in progress, and it will probably always be. However, I am glad to have invested time into “invisible” learning—the not-so-sexy work of reading and taking notes on the basics so I won’t have to re-learn them again.
What this website required 🔗
What I discovered in those six-ish weeks was that there’s even more beyond learning and writing code. Things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
These were things like:
- How do I want to create a website? Coding it by hand? With a static site generator like 11ty? (That is where I landed, by the way.)
- How will I store and organize my ever-expanding and ever-growing (hopefully!) collection of stuff?
- How will I get this thing online and available for anyone to see? (At the time of writing this, I still haven’t landed on my answer to this question.)
- At what point is this site good enough? How often
will Ican I update it?
It was a lot of web design- and development-related stuff to think about and look into!
What I still need to do 🔗
Admittedly, this section is more for me than anyone else, but I need somewhere to account for the things I need to do before I feel like I can consider it good enough and ready for production… and, most importantly, to support making and writing new stuff.
This list is roughly in order of how I think I’ll tackle these.
- Finish uploading my portfolio “reflections” for years 2014–2022
- Finish uploading past notes
- Finish uploading “how to” guides (aka my unsolicited advice—considering getting the domain unsolicited.fyi)
- Deploy this site… somehow
- Create pages for the other collections: portfolio items and book reviews (CSS grid, here I come?)
The good news! 🔗
I’m heading to San Diego for a long weekend. My husband is taking a workshop on Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, so I’ll have plenty of time to myself to make sh*t happen. In my mind, it’ll be enough time to cross a few things off that list!
Stay tuned.