At The End Of Basic Front-End Dev Projects: My Current Issues w/FreeCodeCamp

Up until last week, FreeCodeCamp had been like a dream come true. It had brilliant small, measurable and achievable goals in order to help keep momentum in programming learning, even if you only had the energy for the smallest commitment in the day. It reminded me of the feeling I got when I very first coded with Codecademy: how simple it was to begin, as well as continue, straight from the homepage.

However, I have come to the end of the "Basic Front-End Development" block... And I've reached a sudden roadblock. Technically, yes, we should know everything we have been taught up to that point. I have a reasonable idea of how to use <div>'s and <div class>'s in order to group elements together. I even figured out, through my own research, the one thing I had always wondered... How to create a neat menu along the top, that also follows you as you scroll the page (it turns out it's just an unordered list, with some extra CSS!).

However, the biggest stumbling block was creating my own portfolio page. The "Tribute" project was much easier, as it was easy enough to create an "Ironic" page that incorporated the lyrics of Tenacious D's tribute. I found I completed a rudimentary page pretty quickly on my first attempt, without looking anything up.

Then I got to the Portfolio project. And, I put my hands up (as I increasingly regularly do): the biggest obstacle to my learning is that I am a top-tier perfectionist. If I know exactly what I want, I'll end up creating ridiculous amounts of work for myself to incorporate even the smallest, unimportant element... Even if it means I make no progress with the actual page.

This can be a helpful and important skill; as I mentioned, I have now learned something about creating navigation bars which, even weeks after first learning it, hasn't left me. The problem came when I really wanted that bar to contain a "now playing" section, displaying my currently playing Last.FM track.

In a nutshell, the biggest problem in creating a portfolio for myself is my own ridiculous set of standards. The task was significantly easier when I forced myself into the easier task of emulating my brother's stylish website... But even then, I came up with problems like trying to get a navigation bar centred, and the problems that developed with page colouring when I attempted that.

More than that, I feel as if FreeCodeCamp went from being a course that was very easy to follow, with gamification seemingly ingrained into its soul, to a task where I was suddenly thrown at the deep end. Again, technically this is stuff I have just been taught. But I feel the course could have benefited from another guided example for creating an entire web page within its learning environment (maybe with fewer hints and cues) before asking us to create our own site.

The thing is... I do have a rudimentary Portfolio page created from this as well. And I have made the decision just to submit it; as I know doing so will get me out of this rut, and looking at the continuing course, it goes back to the format of small, achievable tasks.  I intend to go back and improve it as I become more knowledgeable, as well as e-mail/submit this in some way to help improve the course (hell, I would even be willing to help create the learning materials for it).

Anyway, here I present https://glitchwalker.github.io (oh, yeah, I used GitHub instead of the site they suggested; as I already have it set up to update game mod projects, and I preferred the workflow of having the entire site working and editable on my own computer already).

Free Code Camp is free to use and is available at https://www.freecodecamp.org. The learning materials are also open source, and free to use within any setting.

Measure The Time You're Wasting In Your Worth Per Hour

Having a brief flick through my Lifehacker feed, I came across this brilliant article introducing "Sloth Worth". 

Image licensed under CC0 License

It is an extension, for both Chrome and Firefox, that measures the amount of time you are wasting based on how much you earn (or value yourself) per hour. It needs to be enabled for specific sites, but once enabled it shows your total for all measured sites in the top left corner of that site (right now, my total is at £27.41 since this afternoon at £8 per hour, although I also turned it on for Duolingo and Lingvist to experiment how much value I'm using on "positive" endeavors).

Even though the extension is pretty simplistic, it's an eye-opener to how much time you actually spend doing unimportant things or procrastinating. Not to say that relaxing in your preferred way is useless. On the contrary; it's vital for your mental health. However, it's certainly a brilliant way to spur you onto more productive work or learning, if that is something you keep putting off.

The extension has its limits; I'd prefer breakdown of how much value is spent on each site, along with maybe catagories such as "education" or "entertainment", and a breakdown of the time of the day usually spent doing either. It'd also be cool to have a separate "positive" value indicator for time spent on more positive sites, to encourage you to engage with those sites more.

However, as I said, it is an eye-opener.

You can install the extension from their site at  https://qotoqot.com/sloth-worth/