For the past three weeks, I’ve been going through Thinkful’s Front End Course. A major reason that I chose this course was information I heard from an episode of the Ruby on Rails podcast where their CEO talked about programming schools in general and their program specifically. I liked the fact that they made their program more accessible to people and that they place an emphasis on students pacing themselves instead of requiring the maximum time possible. Even though the payments are still relatively expensive compared to other online courses, the fact that it doesn’t require a long term commitment was a huge plus. That and the chance to talk to a professional web developer about my code was what sealed it for me.

For a long time, I knew the basics of CSS and front end development when I read it, but I wasn’t able to use it off the top of my head. I liken it to being able to answer a multiple choice question but failing on the free response ones. Most of what I did before this course was limited to using bootstrap, adding markup to html to correspond with the grids and using their stylings for common components like navigation and form fields.

A lot of the starting material was stuff that I’ve seen before but using it in practice without a step by step guide made a huge difference. This was also a time when another person was actually critiquing my programs and giving me constructive feedback on how to make it better. That feedback alone encouraged me to work at least twice as hard as I would have otherwise because I had someone else to keep me accountable.

I was able to make a static portfolio site that I’m planning to migrate to its own domain in the future along with multiple projects to showcase with it. I’ve already included two demo Rails app I made and I’m planning to add more once I deploy them to heroku. All of this is still a work in progress but it’s really invigorating to see my work displayed like that. I’m looking forward writing a blog post on each project I made in the course and also using the things I learned to edit the css for this blog.