My setback: the early stuff

You Can Do This!
#1

Hi there fCC community!

I must admit that I have not utilized the community part of the fCC experience as much as I should have. Without getting into a bunch of details that are not germane to the problem, let me give you a bit of a rundown:

–Started working through the fCC curriculum about a year ago
–Had a bit of a gap come up for a few months
–Resumed and now I am getting close to the end, where I will actually submit for all 6 certs

I find that I am struggling–not with any backend, data vis, or qa/testing elements. And I feel like my grasp of React/Redux at the frontend is good. It’s actually the CSS more than anything (and/or CSS-related tools like Sass, Bootstrap, etc.).

I didn’t struggle like this initially learning CSS and HTML (and using things like Sass or Bootstrap to make my CSS more efficient). But I feel like it is taking me way, way to long to style a basic box to hold a React component, or lay out a page.

Any recommendations? The only thing I can think of is to perhaps repeat the earlier challenges. But if anyone else has a resource or suggestion in addition to that, it would be incredibly useful. I feel like, with only a handful of projects standing between me and finishing, I should be tossing up at least marginally well-styled projects without such difficulty.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions/ideas/advice!

#2

I spent 2 hours just styling a single input once.

CSS can be a very finicky thing, especially if you are iterating on a design over and over until it feels right.

Really, the solution is to keep practising.

You could also find impressive pens on Codepen and read their code to see how others achieve the results you are looking for.

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#3

CSS just keep plucking away at it. I never recommend redoing an entire course, but just reviewing a topic here or there instead. Like for me, reviewing the position attribute was a game changer for me one day.

I often find Google leads me to alligator.io when I search for CSS stuff, but there are other short tutorial websites as well. Also stack overflow of course.

But ya, CSS is just a pain sometimes. Selectors can be a useful topic as well. Like how to select the parent element or something like that.

I usually start with a framework like Bulma or Bootstrap, and then override their CSS where needed. No sense in making a Navbar from scratch. Time is money.

Another thing you can do if using a package manager is dive in to the node modules folder, as an example, and actually find the Bulma > Nav component, copy and paste it and then modify it. But that’s only if something is being really finicky.

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#4

Thank you for the suggestions!

If you happen to come back to read this, I wanted to clarify something: I was not suggesting redoing all of the exercises for the first cert–just the projects. I figured recreating the final projects in the responsive web design unit will help, as it is now almost a year ago that I completed them!

Thanks for the tip for alligator! Pip, with Flexbox Froggy (as silly as it sounds) is another great practice resource I’ve found.

I appreciate your input! And if anyone else wants to chime in, by all means please feel welcome to do so.

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#5