This project has, and now continues to annoy me with its refusal to cooperate. To explain, if you look up my resume online on safari, it doesn’t show any of the changes I made, but it does on chrome, so I have no idea how that works, but is another sign to me that Apple is ultimately a source of evil.
I’m getting far ahead of myself, let me bring it back a little. So project 2 for DMA 201 is to create an online resume for future employers to peruse, which is very useful for after graduation (or maybe next semester while I’m internship hunting!). But the way to go about it had me petrified. Coding is not completely unfamiliar to me, I’ve seen it one on television and I know friends who like to design things for the web, but God bless them because I look over my shoulder and wonder how anyone can make sense of that jumble of words. To few, its a careful complex of building blocks, to me its a game of Boggle that involves numbers and punctuation as well as letters. Needless to say, I was paying VERY close attention to the instructions this time around, otherwise I would get caught in the web and not know where I am. I was so afraid to even begin and lose track. When my page got pulled up during class for a “spot check” and nothing came up because I was still figuring it out…never more have I been so embarrassed. And that lovely memory was recorded on lecture.
But the process proved itself (mercifully) easier than what I anticipated when I had the layout in front of me. Ultimately the project was to replace the “laurem ipsem”s with information from my (already-made) resume, change the colors to something my liking (I went with a classic navy blue), changed the font to one I like, this time the serif type “Lora”, and then add my relevant information where it applies, like education and work experience. But most importantly, or impressivly depending on your persepective, is to include your personal monogram from Lab 4. I was very proud of the design of my monogram, and having it on display for my webpage made the work soar for me. And Brackets has the excellent feature of showing the page on display as you are changing details, which allowed me to track my progress. At the end of the day, I’m very happy wth the work I put on the page (and that was before someone walked by and said it looked impressive!).
So what empowered me to get my feet wet and code like a professional DMA major during this process? Well, that would be the words of another professional who had some choice words on coding. On Joshua Seiden’s blog, he provides an entry that is titled “Coding is the Right Answer to the Wrong Question”. The entry, written by someone who knows how to code inside and out professionally, let me know that it wasnt imperative to know that process in order to design for the web. after all, there are so many stes available today that make the process easier than ever for someone to make a webpage or a resume and have it looking professional in a few simple steps. This process was obviously more intensive than that, but I also think the product is higher in quality because of it. Above that, however, my heart and hard work is in that page, and I don’t know any site that can guarantee that.
How could this process be improved for the future of this class? Well, I think for cases like me, assurance that coding is a practice that can be taught step by step, even for beginners, will erase early fear in student’s hearts. I think this project was actually very straightforward once a full session of the instructions was completed, with something I can look back on. But from there it isn’t just copying what Dr. Dunkle does, you begin to notice the headers and featres for yourself, and suddenly you just want to play with them and truly make that page a representative of oneself.
As for my own submission? I’m very proud to have it stand for me. (Although having it work on Safari over chrome might have saved me some panic.)
