A couple of roadblocks this week…

This week was the hardest for me yet, and I found myself hitting the wall and reaching out to message boards more than I ever have before. Codecademy, where I had been breezing through in HTML and CSS, started to become more vague and confusing for me. In more and more cases, instead of saying, “type this,” the instructions were “do this.” I found myself looking back through past lessons and trying to find links to what I had learned and what they were asking me to do, but — no matter what — the code didn’t work. (In one case I think that there was an actual bug on the page, when I deleted all of my code and submitted it the display still came up with type as if there was code present). What I ended up having to do was go to the Codecademy forums and look line for line a code that did work, finally finding out how to structure something seemingly out of thin air.

I also had a lot of trouble with the captions, and figuring out how to attach them to the images so they wouldn’t be on the same page. Once again, I went to the message boards (and Google) to help me solve my problems.

What I learned was that I’m always going to have to rely on a community of experienced coders if I’m going to keep experimenting with new tricks. There are times when I’m going to get stumped and the instructions aren’t going to help me anymore, and I’m going to need to keep an open dialogue with others. Fortunately, the coding community is very responsive and friendly, and there is always someone who is able to look over your code and provide a fresh set of eyes.

Most of the time, especially in confusing JavaScript, one beginner’s mind isn’t enough.