DEV Community: Fredrik Berg

Finished week 1 Scrimba Fullstack path!

Fredrik Berg — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 20:33:07 +0000

Then I have finished one week of Scrimba

With 1 kid, work, 2 dogs and a girlfriend and training everyday it is difficult to find time, but I can manage to sit down on the computer here and there during some open timeslots almost every day, but I would say I haven't used more then 4 hours this week unfortunately (just a guess).....
Which is way below my ambition of 7-10 hours during a week, but at least I have had some progress.

Currently I have gotten to the first Solo Project (Hometown), where I should make a landing page for my hometown, that should consist of a hero-section, introduction/tourist activities section, and a "business"-card introducing myself as a guide.

We have been "tasked" with a requirements during this task.

Requirements for the task -

and some stretch goals:

I am from Trondheim, Norway, so therefore I want to create a site about my hometown. I am not too creative at this point, because of the level of my skills.

I am struggling with the hero-section (embarrassing), I want to have a picture of Trondheim in the hero-section with title-boxes as overlay on that picture. I wrapped the hero-section in a div and gave it a class (perhaps an ID would be more correct?), but I am not sure how to set the picture to full width without cutting a piece of the picture.

I used CSS for setting the background image, and tried using background-size: cover; but that didn't work. I have also tried setting the width to everything from 400px to 1200px, but when it exceeds 900px it cuts out a part of the picture (height is 400px), so I am a little bit stuck here unfortunately..

Right now it is sunday evening, I have a baby that is sick with fever, and tomorrow is work so I have to log off but I will continue the troubleshooting. If I am not able to solve it within a decent amount of time I will either continue, or ask ChatGPT (if I can't find anything on Google)..

Attached is how it currently looks..

Session #2 on Scrimba - the art of troubleshooting is still not mastered

Fredrik Berg — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:22:24 +0000

Time used: 2 hours
Total time: appr. 4 hours

(I will need to use a time tracker to be more accurate with the time used from now on, it will be interesting too see when the fullstack path is finished how much time I have used).

CSS
I went through (almost the whole section) of the business card section. The task was to create a business card that give a short presentation of who you are, and you are encouraged to be creative here.

During this session we went through; flex box, websafe fonts, inheritance and justify-content.

I have alot of thoughts on how the business card could look like, and there is a ton online, where I can see the source code (HTML, CSS and JS) but that is cheating. It is the easiest thing in the world to copy code from another and paste it, but I wouldn't understand it so I am taking my time here..

Right now I want to create a hover-function which changes my profile picture when hovering over the picture, but I can't figure it out and it is getting late. 2 hours on this session is very long but I have been troubleshooting this for at least half the time, and I haven't managed to find out why.

Perhaps since the src of the image is written in the HTML code and the background-image I want to change it with is written in the CSS-code? Stupid thought maybe!? I am still trouble shooting and refuse to use ChatGPT.

Here is a snippet of the business card (pretty boring):

I used linear gradient for the background color. I have forgotten my previous knowledge, my previous business card was much cooler then this.

I will continue troubleshooting tomorrow.

Below is the CSS code (I couldn't paste the HTML code, it didn't show up as code, why..?)

body {
margin: 20px;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Tahoma, sans-serif;
}

.avatar {
width: 150px;
border-radius: 80px;
background-image: url(images/profilepicture.jpg);
}

.avatar:hover {
background-image: url(images/Festningen.jpg);
width: 150px;
height: 50px;
border-radius: 80px;
}

.card {
width: 400px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 20px;
display: flex;
justify-content: space-around;
text-align: center;
background: linear-gradient(grey, darkgrey);
color: white;
}

.locationparagraph {
font-size: 10px;
color: grey;
}

First learning session - Scrimba📖

Fredrik Berg — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:10:44 +0000

First session

Time used: approx. 2hours.

I went through Intro to HTML and Intro to CSS.

The HTML section contains:
Various basic HTML tags, explanation of DIVs, input field, image, lists, proper HTML structure, anchor tag and how to deploy a website (via netlify).

The CSS section contains:
How to link CSS files, width, margin, inline and block elements, centering and styling of buttons, plus flexbox.

This is very basic and suits me well - I have gone through this from before but I need to repeat cause this is "knowledge" that I have hidden deep in the back of my mind and I need help with bringing that knowledge back.

Some of the videos I have 2x speed on, but I do all the "minitasks" that they give us.

I don't use any IDE yet, I code directly in the learning environment of Scrimba. When it gets to "larger" projects I will use VS code.

For now it has been pretty easy but I know it will become harder further down the road.

The use of AI for beginners just learning how to code?

Fredrik Berg — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:06:16 +0000

Large Language Models and AI is a gift and a curse I would say!
I am not a programmer and I am not using ChatGPT and all the other tools in the most effective and productive way possible, but I see how it can affect the youth and especially those that are in school (high school, college or university). Everything is so available, and you don't learn how to grind or how to interpret information in a way that we had to do before, and my worries is that we will forgot the basics (I am not just talking about programming, but math, how to write, how to focus and how to struggle) since everything is available for us in just a couple of seconds with a good prompt.

It all depends on how you use it ofcourse, if you want it to write your bachelors thesis or if you want it to give you a critical review of your thesis, then that is two different ways on how to use it and the second way might be very helpful.

Therefore I will not use any tools like ChatGPT to write code, or at least minimize it, in my journey to learn programming. It may help me explain some concepts, but preferably not do any of the code for me.

Learning in public - Scrimba fullstack path

Fredrik Berg — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:22:19 +0000

Short introduction to myself

My name is Fredrik, 36 years old, I have a fulltime job working with safety in the energy/oil-gas sector in Norway, educated within the maritime field, I live with my girlfriend, our 1 year old boy and 2 dogs; Kira, which is a 8 year old staffordshire bullterrier, and Macho which is a 6 year old english bulldog/french bulldog/olde english bulldog mix.

My two guard dogs babysitting!🐶

Interest in programming
Since I was a teenager, perhaps even before that, I have been interested in programming, I remember when I was able to create my first hyper link, perhaps it was around 26-28 years ago. I think I used 2 days to figure out how to do that, there wasn't many resources to learn from and I was very young so couldn't understand much of the documentation out there....

I took a maritime education and have been working within this field since 2012 - for various shipping companies and operators.

Here we were training with the swedish coastguard on our way to Nynashamn for offloading crude oil.

How to do this?
I am going to start with Scrimba fullstack path, I need to dedicate a fixed amount of time during the week, and post regularly. I am also thinking about registering the actual amount of hours I am using on Scrimba and give a review on my sessions. This is at least what I have in my mind right now, lets see how it develops..

Motivation and ambition
Motivation is just learning itself. I am not in need or rush to get a developer job or anything like that, but I do have an ambition of being able to create various fullstack projects, and my dream would be to be able to become a freelancer, either as a side gig or as a fulltime freelancer but I am realistic about this. This project with learning in public is mainly to push myself, it creates a pressure on me by publicy announcing that I want to complete the Scrimba fullstack path.

I also hope that I can be able to get to know alot of people in this community, and that we can help and motivate each other.

Thank you for reading!