Week 4 (02.13 to 02.19)

Almost a month of learning and I feel like I made great progress so far. I finished going through the CSS Foundations chapter from The Odin Project and moved on to learning the CSS Box Model as well as Flexbox, a not-so-new design paradigm for websites.

FreeCodeCamp is slowly becoming one of my favorite learning resources as it’s project-based. The explanations are very succinct though, but since I have two other learning resources, it’s not really an issue. I can inspire myself from these projects to make my own and upload them to my GitHub. Slowly creating my portfolio!

With the Udemy course, this week, I finished all the CSS foundational sections, and I’m about to get to the Pricing Panel project, which will make use of all the CSS knowledge I’ve been taught so far. CSS Box Model, Flexbox and various CSS properties.

Organizational struggles and successes

I’ll admit though, this week, there were some days where I was behind some tasks, and I had to postpone them a few times. So I had to compensate for that lack by spending more time on some platforms. Still managed to finish all that I wanted for this week.

Besides learning new technical knowledge about Web Development, I’m still taking this Learning How to Learn MOOC on Coursera. I’ve learnt about Procrastination and Memory and the brain, as well as techniques on how to improve learning and beat procrastination.

Surprisingly, one of the ways to beat procrastination that was taught in the MOOC is something I started doing last month! Which is having a planner and planning my learning.

One thing I learned though was planning an ending time for my studies. I haven’t implemented that in my learning yet, but I will. It’s very true that sometimes, my learning can go until very late, like 11P.M. Although I feel very active and engaged in the evening, I know it’s detrimental to my well-being by pushing my sleep time later and later.

And sleep is essential for memory consolidation and making connections between pieces of knowledge.

So all in all, having:

  • A planner and handwriting goals and learning plan
  • Scheduling an ending time
  • Learning with the Pomodoro system

are keys to the best studying outcomes, and I’m pretty proud of having 2 of these 3 already integrated in my learning system.

The trickiest part of learning this week

I’ll admit that CSS is quite complicated. What I had the most trouble with is Flexbox, and also its interaction with the width and height properties for responsive designs.

Secondly, the relative units are a concept I found difficult too. Percentages are not so complicated but vh and vw I still don’t get it. However, it seems like they’re not widely used compared to em, rem, px and percentages.

But as always, all of this will become clear as long as I practice it.

The projects that were done in the Udemy course and FreeCodeCamp are very interesting and I think I can derive some personal projects out of it. I definitely should add some more projects to my GitHub in that sense.

What’s coming up next week?

I’m excited for this week, as I’ll finish my foundational learning of CSS and move towards JavaScript to make interactive websites. This is also the language that’s used in several Front-End frameworks, and some Back-End frameworks too.

Fortunately, it’s a programming language, and having learnt C++ and Python, I’m already familiar with programming basics, I’ll learn the syntax and peculiarities of the language. But I already believe that I understand the logic so it wouldn’t be too complicated.

I’m very proud of the progress I made this week. I feel confident in my HTML and CSS skills now. Not an expert by any means but with enough grit and patience, I believe I can replicate complex designs, both fixed and responsive.

I’m trying to implement the new strategy for my learning system that I’ve been taught from the Coursera course, and keep going, keep planning my learning.

I hope this week’s review was inspiring to help you either get started on a new learning goal or keep going. If it had a positive impact on you, please leave a comment below.

See you in the next post.