I don’t have a lot to say other than it has been a while since I have written a post for this blog. If this blog was a baby I could be charged with neglect.

I have been working for a while on some rather advanced stuff with coding, although I still need practice with the more basic stuff. Really, I need a job that allows me to use these skills. In the absence of that, though, I’ll keep plugging away as I have been, working toward some nebulous goal. I don’t have a clear idea of where I am going with all this coding stuff - just a feeling that it is going to factor into my work at some point.

Let me list out a few of the topics I have been working on and try to think a bit about each.

  • SSH: I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with this one since it is really just one section of a larger course. I have set up SSH encryption keys for both GitHub and for a new development server I have created on DigitalOcean.com, and I’m pretty clear on how to upload, download, and clone from these locations. I’ll need to do more work with SSH to get more comfortable, but that is coming.
  • Foundation: I have been working on a Udemy course that teaches how to use the Zurb Foundation front-end framework, and so far I have created two full websites for my portfolio. Parts of Foundation seem to work like Bootstrap, though I don’t feel quite comfortable with it yet. I like the fact that it uses Sass for styling, but unfortunately this also adds to the huge size of the directory. I did learn with the second site how to delete unnecessary files and directories before deploying a site, so that does make a difference. A powerful framework in general, though.
  • Bootstrap: I’ve worked quite a bit with Bootstrap, so I feel very comfortable with it at this point. It really is dead simple once I got the hang of it, and it produces small files sizes that are ready for production. I like Bootstrap 4 much better than Bootstrap 3 - Bootstrap 3 added a kind of sameness to all pages that got boring fairly quickly. After doing a Udemy course on Bootstrap 4, though, I have a much wider palette to work with when creating sites. Good stuff.
  • Web Design: While this one is not necessarily about coding, it has given me some insight into the broader process of creating websites and apps. Most of the work in design is done in Adobe Photoshop, so I have gotten somewhat proficient in using that program. I was particularly pleased with two Udemy courses I took on the web design process and on typography - I have to say that I have a better appreciation for typography in particular. I feel confident now that I can create wireframes, stylesheets, mockups, mood boards, and so on such that I don’t have to do the entire design process in the browser, so to speak. I need to nail down a professional process that starts with a client’s needs and ends with a finished project. I feel like I have a better idea of that whole process.