Hi everyone, I’m just getting started on the New Responsive Web Design certificate. I’m working on the first project Build a Survey Form.
As I was going through the preliminary exercise projects, I felt like I was just going through the motions and not really learning anything. I could churn out the code fairly easy, as long as I was being told what to code.
Now, trying to style the Survey Form I am at a complete loss. I will try to get by using MDN and other resources, but I want to make sure that I’m getting the most out of this training.
Are there any recommendations for going through these exercises? Are you pausing to take notes or copying your code to your local machine for review?
I suggest to learn like you will work as a developer:
Ask yourself what you want to achieve,
look for the right documentation, use
what you just learned.
In your case: You want to change the background color in your project? Check for CSS background properties online, search the code for the color you want, done.
It might be painfully slow at the beginning. With time you will know the basics and have a decent library of bookmarks to learn the rest as needed.
That’s all the ‘myth’ behind our job, you memorize basics and fill the blanks with research.
A example from just this week: I had to change my React framework, since the one I had been working with had a breaking update it became a pain.
I changed back to React Vite which I hadn’t used in months. I remembered its basic usage and will keep referring to the docs and my old code to restart working with Vite.
There’s too much to know and moving all the time to function without documentation.
What you are going through is completely normal and all beginners have gone through it.
When you are going through the challenges, you are dealing with one concept at a time and working with small examples.
But now you have moved onto building projects, which requires you take what you have learned and combine multiple concepts into one project.
As you go through the exercises, aim for basic understanding.
Then when it comes to projects, tackle one user story at a time.
If you get stuck research for answers or ask questions in the forum.
As you go through this journey, expect to forget a lot of things and needing to google and read documentation for answers.
The more you build projects and work through issues, the stronger you will become as a developer.
Im a beginner aswell. and i find helpful to practice coding on codepen.io
where there is no guide to guide you, I also take notes, and build my own projects on visual studio code. they are shittylooking but i remind myself that they are not for publication just for me to train my coding-muscels.
Nice, your experience will help you to adapt frontend faster.
The two biggest challenges in modern frontend development are responsiveness: You have to make the UI work on everything from a widescreen gaming monitor to a small handheld device.
The second are the overwhelming options of frameworks, some tend to overcomplicate the development process and often hit you over the head with breaking updates. I recommed you to use Vite that I mentioned, with the framework of your choice, it speeds up the workflow.
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