Francis Maile's dot com – Not just another WordPress site

Learn by Building

I’m trying out ProjectLearn.io a curated list of project based tutorials for learning to code.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/Xtremilicious/ProjectLearn-Project-Based-Learning

I went back and looked at the project map on Free Code Camp and saw that work I had done on most of the projects was no longer visible. That, combined with the fact that I have, for a host of reasons have been away from it for a while has led me to a decision. I am going to completely redo Free Code Camp and host all of my work on git. It will a great refresher and give me a lot of practice using git.

CSS Variables and JS (JS30 Day 3)

This was a simple introduction to variables in style sheets -not in a preprocessor like Sass or Less.

I was surprised by how much can be done with just a few lines of code. There are two slider controls for changing values live on the page and a color picker. It is a really basic example but I see a lot of possibilities here.

CSS and JS Clock (JS30 Day 2)

I’ve decided to go with the “Learn Python the Hard Way” method for doing these lessons. That is, I will follow along with the videos, entering and running the code as it is presented. Then I will investigate how it was done and delve deeper to increase my understanding of the code and methods used.

I finished the second challenge the other day but haven’t had time to upload and post about it until now. In this lesson we built a simple clock using CSS and JavaScript.

JS30 Day 1 – Drum Kit

Finished day one of the JavaScript30 challenge – the JavaScript Drum Kit.

Wes recommends playing with different ways of learning: watch the video – build the project; build while watching; try first on your own – then watch and adjust if necessary. I did this one by the watch-and-copy method. I think I learned some things but it felt too much like cheating. So I’ll be attempting the next project on my own first.

JavaScript Challenge

I just started the coding challenge JavaSript30 by Wes Bos. I came across the course on Hacker News. Though I had not heard of Wes before, I decided to give the course a go because 1) it’s free, 2) even if it isn’t a great course, any JS practice is usually useful.

The course is designed as series of coding challenges where the student actually builds things. I learn best by doing. Theory separated from practice doesn’t work. So, I’m looking forward to diving in and building things.

So far, production value seems high. We’ll see how good the course content is.