Old Curriculum Notes

My goals have changed substantially since this site started. I started it with a goal of learning to code and I was trying to come up with a project, such as an open source city building game. 

I also kept having Python recommended to me as a good first language to use and I no longer recall some of the things I was told that made me think that was reasonable and potentially a good place to start. I mention it in case someone reads this blog and has nebulous "learn to program" goals like I had. 

So for the original incarnation of this blog, I copied the following curriculum and I made a page with rambly notes. 

Lambda School Summer Hackers

Curriculum

In Lambda's summer program you'll learn full-stack web development. We'll take you from building user interfaces to designing database schema. By the end of the course you'll be able to build your own professional quality applications.

    WEEKS 1 - 5

Web Foundations - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and UI Principles

    WEEKS 6 - 10

Web Application Development - React, Redux, React Router, HTTP/Ajax, and Functional Programming Techniques

    WEEKS 11 - 15

Back End Development - Node.js, Express, SQL, SQLite, PostgresSQL, Authentication, OAu

I already know some HTML and CSS and use them on an ongoing basis. I use Blogger AKA blogspot for my blogs and it takes CSS snippets and also gives you the option to use HTML instead of their plug and play interface and I do that regularly to add block quotes or tweak things blogger doesn't have a button for.

If you participate in anything on the Internet and you have ever edited anything, you've probably written code snippets. Like if you edit your comments on Reddit, it gives you an option to edit it in Markdown instead of with their buttons.

So if you ever write an asterisk before and after a word for italics or two asterisks before and after a word for bolding, you are writing code. 

It's baby steps, like a toddler saying ma and you aren't ready to write the equivalent of a college paper, but I've talked to people who felt intimidated until I explained that and they were like "So when I manually write in the colors I want because they took them out of the drop down menu on my forum, I'm writing code?" 

Yes, you are. Stop being intimidated.

HTML is HyperText Markup Language. HyperText means it makes links you can click on. It's the foundational language for the Internet. 

Are there complicated bits I've forgotten for how to format a page layout? Sure. I'm mostly using it to make links and format text. 

But a lot of basic principles generalize, like opening tag and closing tag. And that generalizes to other languages to some degree.

HTML uses mathematical less than and greater than signs to start a code snippet and stop it. No, there's not a fancier word for those doohickeys. I looked it up recently.

 <a href="https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/">Doreen Michele</a>

That's your basic HTML code for making HyperText links. It's called an A tag. 

For CSS, you use brackets instead and there's some formatting differences. 

{Something you want to format: how you want to format it;}

CSS is Cascading Style Sheets and it adds pretty formatting to stuff. It's best to learn those together.

CSS can be added to stuff sometimes from elsewhere. My ex was on some forum or something and they locked up stuff at some point and didn't allow more edits, but he had a link to a CSS style sheet in his code and kept changing how it looked after being locked out of editing ability on site. 

Cascading means there's an order of priority and you may not understand what that order is. So sometimes CSS doesn't do what you expected because of that order of priorities deciding what your code applies to.

I run into this regularly when adding CSS snippets to blogger. Sometimes it doesn't change the thing I'm trying to change and then I need to decide how else I might solve my problem.

UI Principles means User Interface Principles. Years ago, I read a book called Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. You can probably find a free PDF of it online. 

I've had a class in journalism and website design has some things in common with newspaper layout:

1. The space above the fold is premium real estate. 

In newspapers, that means the part visible on the news stand when it's folded in half like gets done.

On websites, it means the section showing in your browser when you first click into it without scrolling.

So stuff you want everyone to find should be up there. Legalese and such that you need to make available can go at the bottom.

2. Space is limited. So less is more.

Headlines and HyperText links to other pages etc should be as short as possible without interfering with understanding them.

This is why a lot of my websites have an archive called Log instead of Archive. It's less than half the letters.

3. Colors on your website are not art. They are more like engineering 

You want it to look nice, sure. More importantly, you want it to be readable and some color combinations and other design choices interfere with readability and therefore interfere with usability of your site.

Good engineering tends to look good. But it doesn't run the other way. Looking good doesn't make it good engineering.

I'm publishing this so I can delete old pages with curriculum notes to clean up the backend of this blog because that makes my life easier.