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A post detailing my experience through a boot-camp and how the various projects I did made me love web design. Hi, my name is Deaje Trott, a recent graduate from a coding boot-camp from which I discovered that I love creating websites. A little heads-up before we begin, this post is very long and I can ramble at times, I apologize for that. The reason I’m writing this is mainly personal, but it was also suggested to me. Many people, including myself, go through experiences not knowing where it all started, so my hope for this is to be a milestone I’ll look back to. Also, hopefully giving a little insight to anyone in a similar position. Now before we talk about my experience lets go back to September 2011. It’s my first year at middle school, I have a big interest in computers. I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with them(and somehow breaking them), so anytime we had ICT; I’d be one of the first students there.
One of my fondest memories was when we created a website. I still remember the feeling I had when making it. It was nice; a feeling of comfort, contentedness like I could easily spend the whole year doing this. In the grand scheme of things putting some HTML code into notepad and having words pop up on a screen doesn’t seem like much, but to 12-year-old me; that was a huge accomplishment. We had to create a website about a celebrity. I decided to do mines around the American rapper, Eminem because 12-year-old-me thought Eminem was cool. I wish I had the original website, but I remember how it looked, a highly saturated blue with a header, links, somewhat similar to this… Ah, that blue gives me some nostalgia. It wasn’t the best color I could have picked, but that assignment only lasted a week. I remember begging my teacher at the end to extend it, but alas my pleas fell on deaf ears.
It was time to move on. Fast forward 7 years and here we are. Now hold up, why didn’t I just continue making websites outside of school? Well, in retrospect, I probably just thought it was something neat, like those days in science where the teacher would show you some cool experiments. It was fun; you wanted to do it every class, but the teacher eventually moved on. Me being 12, I didn’t have the foresight or experience to see a potential hobby or career prospect, so it just fell flat. I’ve only realized after finishing the boot-camp how far I could have been if I started then. How different things would be, hmm… Ok, let’s continue. At the time of writing this, it’s been over a week since I graduated from my 3 months long full-stack development boot-camp, and it was not at all what I expected (in a good way).
The first day of class, nervousness, anxiety, a bit of optimism; All the indicators of starting something new. In the first couple of weeks, we learned about Git, HTML, CSS, all that stuff. At that point I was lukewarm, a lot of things were clicking, but not fully, HTML & CSS, I got down fairly well. JavaScript was still iffy, JQuery helped with that. So far so good, we started to build our portfolio sites. I created this in the second week of our boot-camp; it’s mainly placeholder stuff. I’ll likely scrap the whole thing and redo it with this newly gained knowledge of front-end. But I thought it was a good start? Next, we had to create a calculator; basic mind you. So this is what I came up with. I decided from the beginning that I wanted it to look like an actual calculator even so far as googling images of calculator screens for inspiration. Everything here was done by hand using HTML, CSS and a little photoshop.
All my classmates created their version, but I think I was the only one that spent all their time making it look like a calculator (The actual calculating part doesn’t work). It was fun working on, but it doesn’t work, sounds like a fail… Well personally no, I don’t think so. Going through my projects looking for things to mention in this post, I now realize that this homework right here changed everything for me going forward in this boot-camp. I could have balanced my time working on the JavaScript and style it a bit, but honestly, that sounded so boring, I wanted to see how far I could take it. I think it gave me more confidence and a better idea of how styling things work in HTML. Now I like JavaScript, I do. It’s the first programming language that finally stuck with me, but programming languages tend to be very… There are a lot of steps to do something simple, but maybe that’s my lack of experience talking.
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