Advice on HTML & CSS - I am not enjoying them!

1

Hello, I would greatly appreciate any advice, comments, or thoughts…

I am slowly working through the Free Code Camp curriculum, and on the whole, am really enjoying it and the learning to code experiance. For several reasons (primarily a chronic health issue that sometimes requires work flexibility) am determined to work as a coder remotely.

But while I enjoyed learning the HTML and CSS exercises, I found the actual Tribute Page and Portfolio Page exercises a real drag. I just did not enjoy them, and consequently, it has taken me a long time to be motivated enough to complete them (and even then, to my shame, at a relatively poor standard).

I believe that I am not particularly interested in the aesthetics of front end web design - colour schemes, fonts, the positioning of text/pictures etc.

I the meantime all my available time has been spent learning javascript (even helping out writing code to automate a relation’s small business), teaching myself procedural map generation (just for fun), writing software to control an Arduino homebrew PID controller and an interface to use it. All is this is at a very basic level but very enjoyable, so it is not like I don’t like coding!

So back to the point:
Should I persist with HTML/CSS front-end web development, or drop it entirely and focus on something else? But what?
Or should I learn it quickly so I at least have a basic level of competence even I choose to focus entirely on the back-end?
Or am I being foolish, and just need to accept that we won’t always enjoy every aspect of our jobs and take the time to master it as best I can, even if I don’t like it?

Cheers, thanks for reading; any advice, comments, or thoughts welcome!

2

I don’t enjoy design much either and consider styling to be a necessary evil. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’d say that it’s worth it to have enough HTML/CSS skills to be able to create an interface for your projects, but don’t kill your enthusiasm by spending a ton of time on it. As you advance, other projects will still involve HTML/CSS because they are web applications, but focus on function over form. Give it some kickass features and clean, robust code.

3

That’s basically what I did a few years ago. I learned enough vanilla CSS to be competent, but nobody is ever going to hire me for my awesome CSS skills.

4

Thank you for saying that out loud. That is exactly the way I felt while doing them. Once I finished them and got into the algorithm challenges I was able to get excited again. I say just power through it and perhaps you will find joy in the javascript algorithm challenges that come later.