DEV Community: Miriam

🎃 Spooktacular ’25 — A Haunting Event for the Undead

Miriam — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 11:07:02 +0000

This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Halloween Edition, Perfect Landing

What I Built

Spooktacular ’25 is a “creepy but fun” Halloween landing page with a touch of retro vibes.
Instead of creating an event for humans, I flipped the idea: this is a website for ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural beings who want to plan their Halloween night out — or rather, their night of haunting.

I wanted the page to feel like a mix between a spooky movie poster and an event portal.
Because I love horror movies, sound was a must-have — it sets the mood immediately and gives the page a cinematic feel. I also spent quite some time choosing images that matched the tone but still felt cohesive with the color palette.

Demo

GitHub Pages
Live Demo
Repo

Journey

One of the most fun parts of this project was how playful it became along the way.
I like the “Exorcism Risk” location rating — a small example of the humor that kept the project alive (or undead 👻). I was really just having fun with it.

From a technical side, I tried a few new things:

A custom popup dialog that appears when you “submit” the form
A sound toggle switch to enable or disable background audio
Smooth scrolling between sections using scrollIntoView({ behavior: "smooth" })

I had worked with audio before, but only simple play/stop buttons — so the toggle felt like a nice little level-up.

I’m especially proud of how the sound effects and overall atmosphere came together.
If I had more time, I’d love to add more content for the locations, working links, and a few more mischievous Easter Eggs hidden in the site. I also still have a picture that I really wanted to integrate but unfortunately there just was no use for it at this point.

License

Creative Commons – CC BY-NC 4.0
Feel free to use this project for personal or educational purposes — remix it, learn from it, or give your ghosts a new home. 🎃

Thanks for the cool challenge! :D

..........

💝 Frontend-loving dev & intern, persistent tinkerer
👽 Alien & Catpuccin rainbow vibes
☕ Indie Web & Old Web, Retro-Glitter-Feeling

🔗 Website | GitHub

Random thought

Miriam — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:21:02 +0000

Isn't it funny how VS Code counts your problems for you? But these are only the problems in my code, not in life. Now is that a good or bad?
And how many problems does your editor currently count? 😈

Balancing Focus and Fatigue as a Full-Time Developer

Miriam — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:02:33 +0000

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to code full-time.
It’s not about disliking it - I really enjoy learning and building things - but I often struggle to stay focused for such long stretches.
My productivity usually peaks in the morning, but that’s also when most meetings happen. Like, right in the middle of my flow. By the time they’re done, my brain’s already half drained.
After lunch, my focus drops even more. I try to push through, but I’m not as sharp anymore.
There are topics I’d love to explore more deeply, but once the official workday ends, my energy is gone. So they just pile up.
I’m really curious how others deal with this.
If you’re a full-time dev:
How do you manage breaks and still get your hours in?
And what do you do when your brain just refuses to cooperate anymore?

From art to code: a shift in curiosity

Miriam — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:13:53 +0000

For a long time I identified over my craft, which was art. Not that it isn’t my craft anymore, but it isn’t the main one anymore, I suppose. That is because I had to make a life-changing decision to change careers, which brought me onto my current path of becoming a developer.

I used to think art was the only thing that could be a fulfilling career. And while I already had skills in HTML and CSS, I made a necessary shift in mindset to take on coding as a new passion. When I seriously started learning to code, I was afraid I had left that part of myself behind.

But over time, I noticed something: what once made me draw for hours now makes me explore how things work, how problems can be solved, and how I enjoy pushing my own understanding further.
It’s the same curiosity, just a different tool set. I still miss the quiet flow of painting sometimes and the way I could express myself through art. But coding gave me a new kind of rhythm: one that rewards patience, precision, and investing time and energy into something challenging. I was able to connect with others and to discover that I can invest myself fully in a very different kind of work, which requires a completely new way of thinking, and uncover strengths I didn’t know I had.

I believe this change has been good for me, and I don’t dwell on the life I left behind. On the contrary, I look forward to my future as a developer and can work toward it with intention and focus.

Have you ever switched paths? How did it feel to embrace something completely new?

My personal study guide

Miriam — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:11:11 +0000

Disclaimer first: I am not saying that I stick to all of the below guides/tipps all the time and entirely. I may not always follow all of these, sometimes a tipp doesn't apply to a certain subject, sometimes I may be tired or too focused on the task at hand to take notes and later cannot put it into words anymore in a way that makes sense. Also, this may not apply or appeal to everone.

But I collected some guidelines and ideas for myself on how to study more effectively. here we go!

Time to reflect

For example once a week, ideally at the end of a week, but this could even be a daily habit if one has the time and energy: put time aside for reflection. Questions to ask yourself may be...

What did you learn this week/today, that wasn't clear to youbefore?
What was (most) difficult and why?
What would you do differently next time?
What are/were reoccurring points of struggle?
Which mistakes did you repeat or what things did you forget repeatedly?

Noteworthy during a coding session

Some things that could help if they were documented while trying to solve a problem. Reflection doesn't have to result in a solution.

What did you try first and why did you think that would work?
What confused or hindered/blocked you?
What did you understand after getting the answer (no matter if you found the solution yourself or if it was given to you)?

Before asking for a solution

Before asking online, another person or an AI, try finding clarity by answering these questions:

What do you think where the error lies?
What did you try to test that theory?
What else could you try?

Don't just document

Yes, document, but that doesn't mean to mindlessly writing stuff down. Instead, write your thought processes as working through problems. Bonus tipp: if you're lazy to write, self-talk can also help. This is assuming you are studying/coding by yourself.
You can also document useful code snippets and error logs (ideally in a way that you can retrace what they meant).

Bonus Tipps: You can try to sum up what happened in a tutorial you've been watching - afterwards, otherwise it's cheating. And when you write your documentation you may or may not want to use color-coding and/or a tag- or symbol system (⚠️❓💡). In the end there is always the possibility to turn this into a cheat sheet :-)

PS: Works digitally and also manually. Whichever you prefer, I do a combination of both.

I hope you found this useful!

What does Frontend even mean anymore?

Miriam — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 09:14:30 +0000

Back in my day - I say, while holding up my wrinkly old lady finger - I taught myself HTML and CSS. That was Frontend. Now it's so many things. When I read job descriptions it sounds like Fullstack to me. And now that I am in a retraining program, when it was about time to apply for an internship, I said "I want to do Frontend". Because really that is where I feel most comfortable, even if I am not sure anymore what it means exactly.

Now I have started that internship, it's a Frontend role with a tech stack of React, Typescript, fluentUI and SPFx. This is not a complaint but I don't really do anything with CSS and most of my problems are logic based TypeScript things. When I visit my classmates who are also interns at the same company (like the one next door to me) they do either Java or C# with Angular and are supposedly in a backend position (which I also learned how to use). But really they seem to be doing more (S)CSS and HTML than I am. Is that normal?

What does "Frontend" mean to y'all?

Shaming people for using AI, but...

Miriam — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:29:24 +0000

Imagine you have to start over a career. You choose software development and your best shot is to take classes where within a year a bunch of fundamentals get hammered into your head - fulltime, mind you. You also get to build some stuff of which you only understand half because this is nowhere near enough time for in-depth learning or practice.

Then you get to do an internship - hooray! 🎉 So you get your little starter project with a funny tech-stack. You have fundamentals in some of it, other things you've never seen in your life and now you gotta try build an app with that. It turns out to be pretty challenging to find answers to your problems by googling, because the combination of technologies AND the problems are pretty darn specific.

Also, Just like the rest of the team you get your tasks assigned in form of sprints that you are supposed to fulfill within a certain amount of time. So you want to have certain features done until the end of the week. Remember: you have 8 hours per day, 5 days a week (and a life outside of those hours and your mommy or partner or whoever doesn't do your chores). Now, how do you do this without ever consulting the AI?

Asking for a friend...

Lazy about leaving the comfort zone

Miriam — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:36:01 +0000

Hello,
there must be more people like me who feel lazy about one or more aspects of their learning path. I hope this is the right place to talk about this problem: I like frontend but I feel so lazy about doing backend things - maybe you're just like that too, or the other way around?

I am currently in a retraining program in IT. In the last year we learned - amongst other things - basics of Java and C#. I entered the scene with some experience in frontend (mainly just HTML and CSS). We are currently doing a project in a team that consists of 5 people with the role "developer". Time-wise we are now half way through with the project and I only did frontend. And I am wondering... is that a bad thing?

I know it wouldn't hurt to dive deeper into the backend (currently with C#), but I am more interested in getting a deeper understanding of angular with TypeScript (which we are using rn). On the side I am learning React and trying to get better at JavaScript too.
Soon I'll start an internship where I'll use React with TypeScript.
In the future I would like to work in the frontend (not designing, but coding). I can imagine working with API's but I hope I can avoid DB's.

I prefer doing frontend because I like how it feels more creative (to me) and also more flexible. But I also know it's my comfort zone.

Can anyone relate? And do you think it's bad for my career plans? I can't really estimate how much backend knowledge will be required from me.