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Julie Becomes a Developer : Week 1 of Codecademy’s Freelance Website Development

Years ago when I first got started working at Nextfly I decided to learn a bit of code in order to be able to truly understand the language that puts a website together. Since then, I’ve taken my foundation of knowledge and applied it to my job, which later lead to receiving a promotion to Project Manager, As a Project Manager I used the skills that I learned in my Codecademy Basic HTML and CSS classes and applied them to providing UA support on all websites that came out of development and were in the process of gaining content.

Having the foundation has always been beneficial, however, I knew that I wanted to take my skills to the next level when I took the new position at Nextfly of a Development Director. This is when I decided to turn to Codecademy once again and enrolled in the course “Codecademy Freelance Website Development”.

The Freelance Website Development course had the basic description.

“This course goes beyond definitions and into practices of expert developers. You’ll ease in with the basics and quickly ramp up to confidently build websites with pixel-perfect accuracy. ”

Sounds great, huh? I thought so.

This week is Week 1 for me and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Why? Because on Wednesday I leave for a long weekend trip to Vegas! 

Oye.

Well, I guess of all of the 8 weeks this course consists of, this week is probably the best week to do so. 

Why so? Week 1 starts with a foundation of basic HTML coding techniques. Since I’ve taken numerous classes through Codecademy on HTML, this once should come a bit naturally. Week 3 on the other hand? That’s going to be rough. I don’t know the first thing about Command Line nor Git, but I’m excited to learn! 

Throughout this 8 weeks, I plan on putting together weekly blogs to discuss my achievements, struggles, and what I’ve learned so – stay tuned!

Right now I’m trying to cram 10 hours into 3 days, so it’s going to provide quite the challenge for me. However, with my 6:30am wake up calls, I think I might make it.

The course is designed to be stretched into 5 days of 2 hours each day, which is a schedule I do plan on maintaining…next week.

This week, however, I’ve done the following just on my first week of taking the course:

Day 1
Introduction to HTML : In this lesson I had a refresher on HTML elements and the structure of basic code. Nothing was super complicated about this so I was excite to keep moving on to day 2!

Day 2
Quiz: Introduction to HTML : After Day 1 it was time to put my knowledge to the test with a quiz. Not trying to brag, but this was quite a breeze so I plowed through this with no problems.

Lesson: HTML Tags:  Up until this point things have been pretty simple. We learned the minimum HTML code needed to structure a website which is called “boilerplate code”.  This boilerplate code is pretty dang important to build a website. Without this code, a website will not be able to run so taking in all of this is imperative.

Day 3
Quiz: HTML Tags : At this point we started by building out a basic page with images, a video, and lists. The HTML elements learned in this quiz provide a solid foundation of most websites that I will create in the future.
Article: Getting Started with Atom : Atom is a text editor that Codecademy suggested code editor that has syntax highlighting, color schemes, plug-ins for errors in code and more. 
Article: How to Create a Website: In this lesson we installed the software and did a basic page setup within a folder structure.

Day 4
Quiz: Text Editors and Browsers 
Project: Travel Blog :  This day I learned some of the most popular HTML tags and how they are displayed in a web browser as well as how to build a website using my own computer by starting a a simple blog project. The project really doesn’t look super attractive, so I’m excited to get started on CSS next week to really make the page look good!

Day 5 & 6
Project: Two Sandals Soups and Salads

Seminar: HTML
Next Steps

These days they assigned me a project to work on my computer without any informative steps. Not going to lie, I skipped the project and went straight to the HTML seminar because just looking at the coding they had, I knew I could easily build it from the ground up and was too excited to learn more that I didn’t want to spend time doing something I already knew how to.

Week 2 is CSS. Now, I do have a foundation of CSS just like I did with HTML so I’m not sure what I’ll learn, but I’m excited to keep moving forward. At this point everything has been relatively simplistic, making me scared of what’s to come.

Not going to lie, at this point I’ve been able to keep up, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it these next few weeks. I’ve found it hard to fit the time in, but know I need to prioritize and do so. 

Here’s to the next couple of weeks! Here. we. go!