Back to basics: Front end dev

I’ll be honest, I’ve actually never had any sort of training when it comes to front end development. I fumbled around with it when I was a kid many many years ago, and then in college moved straight into C, C++, Java, and then finally Python in the workplace. But it’s always been an interest of mine (part of the reason this site exists). So I’ve been slowly taking an online course to try to finally get stuff nailed down.

The course I’m currently working through is this udemy course which I picked up on sale many months ago. As soon as I bought it, I quickly forgot about it and decided that learning node/express and angular were better worth my time rather than actually learning basics. 3 months later, I think it’s finally time I actually go through a beginner course once and for all and actually get my foundation figured out before I decide which way I want to go.

The teacher of the course is doing a good job of explaining things, and I like that the course is going to lead to full stack coverage, but MAN is “learning” html dry. There’s some stuff I’m picking up on that I hadn’t known before, but a lot of it is just overly simple. It’s just not that interesting to sit and watch videos on.

That said, I think the teacher is doing his best to make it as interesting as he can. I am learning stuff and getting explanations to things that I’ve always just taken for granted. And his acknowledgement that google is your best friend when coding is very refreshing (and the truth).

So far I’m halfway through the section on CSS, which is something I’ve always struggled with. From the looks of it, I’ll continue to struggle with it after this course as well as it doesn’t appear to actually tackle anything really difficult. Colors and padding really aren’t that crazy… but maybe that’s really all CSS is and I’m over complicating things in my own head.

I’m quickly reaching that magically point I hit in all online courses when I start to lose all focus and feel like my time would be better spent on another course. I’m going to try to stick it out for as long as I can, since I really do want to reach the back end portion and work on the the final project. But man…. HTML isn’t very exciting.