Working on the Hero Section
I spent a good portion of my vacation in Philippines studying C# and going through the curriculum in MDN’s website, and I feel like all I did was study and hardly practiced. It was different with C#, as I was developing simple console applications and so I got to practice my programming very well with each new topic. I did learn through out the process that my programming skills are a little dull, but sharp enough that I couldn’t be frustrated with the challenges presented my way. I still knew how to work variables, develop loops, create and manipulate arrays, and I am slowly remembering how to work with methods again.
My programming skills are waking up slowly, and I am excited to be create my real first application.
But a requirement before I start building web apps is a good foundation in web development. And with regards to HTML, CSS and Javascript, I am practically starting at empty. The last time I tried to built a web page was many years ago in college, and I never really published anything online as my blog in wordpress needed little to no CSS and the HTML was non-existent as I was working with blocks. Not to mention that I never really learned Javascript because I never needed to.
That’s why I was so intimidated to actually build my first project, for almost seven weeks I was just going through the curriculum in web.dev and MDN, I was taking notes but I never really
bothered to actually build a webpage. And looking back, I was afraid of not being able to. Despite knowing that I had the fundamental knowledge to build a webpage, I keep remembering
moments of my past when I would start a new index.html file only for me to delete it because the layout was not working for me. I did this so many times, that I have literally nothing to
show for all my practice with HTML & CSS. I built a lot of things, but never really followed through.
So last week when I decided that I will be building my personal portfolio, the same thoughts of doubt was haunting me daily.
I would look at my web page, be unsatisfied with the layout, with the behavior of the media queries, and be frustrated by the video tutorials who were teaching me different things that I ended up being overwhelmed, not trully knowing what I would do to achieve what I wanted. So of course I wanted to delete the project folder and maybe when I get the chance later, start all over again.
But for some reason, when I built the first version of the web page, I decided to learn GitHub and activated version control. And so when I tried to project, the previous version still existed and it would come back when I opened VS Code once again. And I would look at it, the mess of HTML tags and oversaturated CSS selectors and non-sensical Javascript taunting me.
So instead, I just deleted chunks of the code that I did not like, typed down a new version and committed it as a new version.
And I felt some sense of pride in this. I felt that I moved forward. Sure the navigation bar was still not working as I expected, and the hero section was all over the place, but it was better than the page I built before it. The next few days was then a cycle of me writing and rewriting code, until today when I am finally satisfied with what I actually committed to my repository. The navigation bar was working, and the hero page looked neat, and the scrolling effect I wanted was also working as intended.
I was so happy that I wanted to blog about it.
So this is a lesson, that failure is inevitable. I will fail a lot in this journey, but learning from my mistakes and growing from it is what matters the most.
I am now looking forward to finishing the last few parts and officially release the page as version 1.0 and then I could move to my next projects.