DEV Community: Tuxhedoh

My First Hacktoberfest PR's

Tuxhedoh — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 12:34:05 +0000

There's plenty of text only repo's to contribute to. The first one that had a merged PR was this Hacktoberfest Swag list. I discovered it looking to see if any other companies had incentives for completing PR's. Turns out they do, also, turns out most require a little more work than just updating a couple text documents. :D

The second one I discovered and contributed to appears to have been created simply for folks to complete easy text contributions Hello World in different languages in which I submitted a powershell file.

Day 1 and I'm 50% to getting my t-shirt. How are you doing?

Just Keep Swimming

Tuxhedoh — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 13:31:26 +0000

In my desire to commit to 100 days of code, it was more a desire to actually do something for 100 days in a row that contributed to my skill building, and 100 days of code, seemed like a noble goal. It was not to build, or spend 'X' amount of time doing a particular task, just to be consistent.

I'm not consistent, but I know that when I am, I am more successful. However, this desire for commitment, more specifically setting this goal of 100 days of code, has caused me to stall and stall early. I missed one day, two days, wrote about it, but didn't do anything else... here I am a week plus and no further progress. It's self defeating. Do I mark day one... do I throw in the whole dang towel... do I just keep pushing on, ignoring the lack of progress?

Today... I'll move on. No need to concede failure. I'll make some progress.

Too Easy to Break a Streak

Tuxhedoh — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 12:34:38 +0000

I got a whole week in. I was posting updates and making sure to get my tasks complete...and then the holidays hit and my schedule is all different and I miss one...two... and now it's been 5 days that I haven't done any of my tasks. I'm the only one holding me accountable.

I find it easy when I'm sitting at work during a lull, to pop over to my FCC or open VS Code and just start working, but when at home, I have plenty of time, it just doesn't fit in to the "things I do at home" category yet.

My current problem, and one I frequently face when doing front-end challenges, is that I'm not really a creative designer type. So now I'm on the FCC HTML/CSS challenge to build a tribute page and I just don't care enough to make it look good. I can follow the points to meet the requirements fine enough....

So 2 obstacles present themselves, lack of scheduled time, lack of commitment to the actual building of pages from a creative standpoint.

What do you do to insure that you stay on top of your goals, in my case 100 days of code, through different schedules?

Do you have any tips for how to push through the tasks when you don't care about them?

My Thoughts on FreeCodeCamp

Tuxhedoh — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 19:54:25 +0000

If you haven't been following this series, it's basically a journal through 100 days of code in which I desired to get moving through completing the FreeCodeCamp curriculum and I started by resetting my progress completely, thus forcing myself to go through their HTML and CSS learning paths again. I believe they added the accessibility and responsive sections and possibly even the CSS Grid and Flexbox stuff after I had done it the first time. I think that the HTML and CSS basics were plenty usable (but I've had some practice, I don't know what one might feel if they were starting from scratch). The built-in IDE and live page are a nice touch, though I wish it had some intellisense built in.

I struggled with the curriculum when it came to the accessibility and responsive sections. It would seem that they'd present just a very basic idea, with an exercise to show it. At one point they mentioned, in the last exercise we discussed some tools to help you with this (I believe it was the exercise in accessibility about HSL and colorblindness), and I went back. There were no tools that were discussed. I know that FCC isn't the only player in this game, but I definitely think this was a weak link in their program.

When I started my day, I was hoping to get to the Flexbox section, but I have successfully gotten through everything up to the Projects section. I haven't clicked through the Tribute Page project yet, but I've done it once. If I had never done it, I am not convinced I'd be prepared to do it. Does putting these projects at this point in the material serve the platform? Perhaps it does, it gets people to expand their reading material, searching new sections and participating in the forums - Read-Search-Ask.

The FCC Forums are overwhelming, I rarely feel like I can get my questions answered there and I'm technical, I can't imagine what a new person might feel.

Not Quite a Fail

Tuxhedoh — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 12:17:58 +0000

So yesterday I set out to complete two modules, but didn't get through the first of the two. It's not that I didn't do any work, but I didn't have the time to actually complete it, especially since FCC had an outage mid-day. During the outage I worked on CSS-Battles. I completed 2 and 3, as well as read through Olzhas' - CSS Battle solutions to get an idea of what other folks did. I've got new ideas about how to complete some and might work through them later.

No Big Deal, the streak is in place. Today's attempt finish Applied Accessibility, complete Responsive Web Design Principles, and get through most of CSS Flexbox. I think I can get to CSS Flexbox, but I think it might be a bit EXTRA compared to the previous sections.

My concern over the next few days is the fact that it's a long weekend. I do most of these tasks in slow times throughout my work day.

How do you stay focused on your goals during holidays and weekends?

Accessiblity is on the Menu

Tuxhedoh — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:02:27 +0000

This post was the first on my Dev.to timeline/list thingee when I looked today.

An interactive and practical introduction to Web Accessibility for everyone

Kushagra Gour ・ Jul 2 '19 ・ 1 min read

#a11y #frontend

I've yet to read it, but when I checked today's tasks on FreeCodeCamp, it seems the next module is "Applied Accessiblity".

I'm hoping to make it through both of these today but we'll see.

Transforms and Animations

Tuxhedoh — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 20:12:59 +0000

Today's coding challenges were some of the ones either introduced after I started FCC the first time, or I had skipped over in favor of learning javascript. I'm glad they came up today.

Applied Visual Design started out as kind of a refresher, but quickly moved into learning about transforms and animations. I had not previously taken the time to learn these beyond trying to reverse engineer someone elses project. I have no specific example either. It didn't mean anything. I'm hoping over the next few days that I can find a way to practice these things. This morning as I got myself pumped up for today's lessons, I came across this post and clicked through to the CSS Battle site and convinced myself, aside from the page not working in Firefox, that I wouldn't be able to accomplish any of it. I think I might give it a shot as a daily practice.

What resources helped you when you first learned CSS?

Edit:
After clicking back over to CSS Battle, I realized I needed to login in order to access the "Completed" sets.

71 of 1409

Tuxhedoh — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 20:25:59 +0000

After resetting my freeCodeCamp progress, I spent this afternoon breezing through the HTML and CSS portions of the curriculum. Once you know HTML and CSS basics, there's not really much to do but remember the syntax. So I am refreshed with my HTML and CSS. I think I might check out a CSS book to get more thorough info, but should I? Should I crowd my mind with more info just because it's an option, or should I just keep moving along with the basics?

restarting ....

Tuxhedoh — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 13:36:27 +0000

I'm going to start working through the freecodecamp.org program again. I logged in for the first time today and notice that I've completed 236 of 1409 challenges. I felt like 236 was a lot, but when I consider that is less than 20% of the course, not quite as complete as I thought. Only 2 projects of the 30, and 0 certifications.... if I look at the actual course work, I have previously completed, HTML, most of Basic CSS, a couple Responsive Web Design Projects, Basic Javascript, a few of the Basic Algorithm (this is where I struggle the most), most of Bootstrap, jQuery. How much of this do I remember? Not a ton. The HTML stuff is pretty easy, the basics of JS are there, but ask me to complete a simple project. Not sure I could do it.

A while back I found @aspittel 's content. Following her has given me inspiration to pick this back up.

I want to start 100 days of code, my official start date will be 7/1/19. If anyone is interested in joining me along the way, let me know. I may keep posting here, might move to a personal blog, dunno yet.

The question of the moment, can I reset my progress over at FCC?

Hello World

Tuxhedoh — Tue, 28 May 2019 17:19:21 +0000

So I joined dev.to to comment on a post... now I have this space for something. I don't know what to do here. I'm on the fringes of being a developer. I'm an administrator reguarly making use of Powershell.