DEV Community: Kim

Failing to plan is planning to fail

Kim — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:18:38 +0000

I've missed my hour of coding a few days last week. I did start a new job, and that affected my schedule. The main reason is that I have no idea what to code, and I've been getting stressed trying to come up with a project and design it too quickly.

First of all, I have to remind myself that I'm pretty new to all of this. I've learned some css and html a year ago(I don't think the course I was following was very good), did some javascript and ruby, and had some fun on codewars.com. I was mostly focused on learning the logic behind these languages.

I didn't do much with web design and planning out my own projects, and that's why I'm stuck now. So now I have a rough plan, but before I start a coding challenge, I want to have a solid plan.

I want to focus on three projects:

A to-do list(which I've started)
A calculator
A landing page

Ok, so I have an idea of how I want these projects to look...sleek and modern. I've seen all these cool site and app designs on dribble.com. But when I try to come up with my own design, it never has the same feel. I need to cut myself some slack here too, I'm not a designer.

I need to focus on what I've learned and put it to practice. If I haven't learned something, I can learn it in the future.

What I can do is this:

Get a pen and paper and start sketching some basic layouts
Style with CSS to the best of my ability(it's not going to look like something a designer with 10 years of experience did and that's ok).
Write the javascript on hard-coded elements(what I know how to do right now) and worry about dynamically added elements later.
Keep learning and remember to have fun!

What do you do when you get stuck?

#100DaysOfCode Days 8-14

Kim — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 21:49:12 +0000

Week 2 has been a little shaky. I missed a few days, because well, life happens. I did learn some new things in CSS that I'm excited about!

Right now I'm using frontendpractice.com to practice my CSS skills. They pick out some nicely designed websites and you can recreate them. I think it's great for beginners to learn about different designs, but I definitely wouldn't add these to my portfolio. These are actual websites and it might look like you were trying to pass as the designer of the site.

Right now I'm working on the Ableton project. It's fun and challenging to create these little collages on the website. I like how they use these little collages to make a more subtle z-pattern on the site.

Things I learned this week:

I learned that I can use z-index to put an element behind another element
I can use overflow: hidden to basically hide the overflow of an element.

I'm still learning how this platform works, but I'm assuming you can only add your main image to a post and not multiple ones throughout the post?

Edit: now I can't get the main image to work, oh well, I'll have to figure it out later, gotta get back to coding!

#100DaysofCode days 1-7 to-do list

Kim — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 01:17:23 +0000

I spent the first few days working on the html and css, and the last few days have been spent on javaScript. I'm going through an HTML and CSS course on Udemy right now, so a lot of that was still fresh in my mind. It's been MONTHS since I learned javaScript. Here are the things I accomplished this week...

Got the "checkmark" and "remove" buttons working on the hardcoded elements.

Set up the "completed" section to automatically remove elements after a certain number.

Set up the "plus" button to add elements to the to-do list
What I'm really stuck on is this...

Getting the "checkmark" and "remove" buttons to work on elements added with the "plus" button

I made some improvement with this today. I made an array to hold the elements instead of using the node list(which I was previously using). I read that the node list is read only and I needed to add elements.

At first, I couldn't get the array to update with adding elements to it, but I did get that working today. Now for the weird part... if I add two elements to the list, I can remove the first item I added with the "remove" button. That is the only "remove" button that works.

Now I'm taking a little break from it. I spent the rest of my hour today working on the CSS on this blog. I felt that it was a better use of time, otherwise, I might have just stared blankly at code for the rest of the hour.

This is just a roadblock, and I know I'll get past it. I am planning on creating a simpler to-do list using just text elements and see if I can get that to work. The code on this to-do list is getting complicated and it's hard for me to see the bigger picture, which is exactly what I need to do.

I hope everyone doing this challenge is having fun working on their projects! Drop a line below and share what you're working on :)