Fear not the Markdown: A Beginner's Quest 😱

Jennifer Reath — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:51:10 +0000

Hashtags, and colons, and brackets, oh my! As a non-techy budding techie, when I see a block of text adorned with slashes and dashes, and sticks and stars, my stomach starts to sink, and an implacable fog rolls over my brain. But change ~~is coming~~ has arrived like an asterisk on either side of a bloated verb, as I am now proudly under the tutelage of Scrimba, and I'm about to crack the code that is Markdown.

Accelerated by engaging introductory instruction and the simplicity of this discrete text conditioner, my trek toward solid understanding is already underway. Triple dashes are beginning to look like clean line breaks, greater-than signs are taking on a whole new meaning, and my greenness is beginning to splay, revealing a snappy little language underneath.

"Fear is a precursor to failure." - J. Reath

Within modest morsels of Markdown, I'm beginning to play favorites. Scan my top 3 list of syntactical showstoppers:

In prime position is the blockquote, with its pristine placement of inspiration or wisdom through the simple click of a couple of keys.
My love for italics captures this secondary slot, and I am seeing stars.
The tertiary trophy holder is the horizontal rule and its sleek slicing of a block of text.
1. Failure to mention the nested list, however, would surely create an incomplete account of my contentment with my burgeoning skillset.

As worry wanes and confidence climbs, I've just dipped a faint foot into the curious concept of code blocks. Visions of a basement-dwelling hacker trying to intercept a Y2K catastrophe evanesce, and I now see the effortlessness with which this handy package of characters can be applied.

   { mymeme_video: 'https://youtu.be/xkfEc6Dqdyw?si=r7niB_g5glvh9vlI' }

A procurement of pixels on a page perpetuates prolonged participation in a published piece. If the quick creation of a code block is indicative of the inertia involved in the addition of an image, I am nearing Markdown mastery!

I've shared my shapeshift from idiomatic overwhelm to ciphertext sculpting, but who might I be? Just a jocund Jennifer, of which there are many, jumping into the world of computerized competence as a woman of a certain age.

My Markdown Muniment

Meagre Mouldings	Mid-tier Mitigation	Monumental Mastery
fingers frozen on keyboard	being quite bold	grinning while making a table

Wherever my forward-facing forays might leisurely land me, an advantageous application of my treasured time has been saddling up with Scrimba, which, coincidentally, can be encountered at hello@scrimba.com. When I believed all hope was lost, I traversed from the lonely plains of plain text plainness to a stream of steady keystrokes, and  has firmly been found.

DEV Community: Jennifer Reath

Fear not the Markdown: A Beginner's Quest 😱

My Markdown Muniment