What's my next step?

[miku86]

@Macro

Aesthetically, it’s nothing too pleasing but my goal was to just get all 10 tests to pass, which I did. Please let me know your thoughts. Do you think I should keep working on it or would you say it’s good to go?

Great work passing the tests

When I do my own projects, I mostly ask myself “Would I like to use this site?”.

Regarding your site, I would probably read it, maybe I would go to Wikipedia directly, because the user interface is similar (white background, black font color).
I think it’s always a good idea to fork your own old stuff and rework the forks to see the differences and your progress.

@Macro

One question I have, though, is if I’m copying code from google searches or the example provided and just customizing it to my needs, does that count as coding (which I did to complete both projects, thus far)? If I’m doing that, does that mean that I really know the material or am I just cheating my way through? What’s your opinion on that?

I think "does that count as coding?" is not the best question. I think nobody cares about "I am a coder", if you are not able to solve problems/create products with your skills. It’s mostly an ego thing.

I think better questions are:

• Am I able to build this from scratch without (a lot of) help?
• Do I feel more able to build stuff after copying this code?

I think the technical implementation is not the hardest part of engineering. It’s a lot about the psychological stuff. Being resilient to frustration. Being able to cope with the stress around it.

If recently wrote a post about concepts vs. implementation regarding CSS, but I think it’s nearly the same with all the engineering.

• concepts: what you want to build => design (What (& Why))
• implementation: how you build it => CSS (How)

When you copy code, you copy the implementation details. You mostly don’t read up on the What & Why. Sometimes fixing the How is urgent and necessary. But to learn a craft, I think it’s more about learning the What & Why.