After struggling through JavaScript last week, learning jQuery was a breath of fresh air. I won’t pretend that parts of it didn’t still confuse and challenge me (or that this section of Codecademy was glitch-free), but at the end of the day it made far more sense to me than last week’s lessons. I also really enjoyed being able to look at the final product of each lesson and feel like I understood something that even just last week felt incredibly overwhelming.

Despite how little time actually purchasing a domain name on GoDaddy took, I found that to be one of this week’s more difficult tasks for me. This was not because I struggle with making purchases online, in fact years of avid online shopping have adequately prepared me for the task. Rather this was a direct result of my being a highly indecisive person. So, convincing myself (for long enough to actually make the purchase) that the name I had chosen was what I, in fact, wanted to stick with was a surprisingly daunting task. This could have been avoided had I chosen to go with my name and make a portfolio page but I realized after our first class that this project presented an interesting opportunity to hone in on an interest, rather than focus in on myself.

In trying to expand my jQuery vocabulary this week, I came across an interesting jQuery tag line: “write less, do more.” Despite this not being a new concept in this class, something about it stood out to me. In fact since day one, the readings and the homework have been reiterating that if our code is repeating itself or is overly complicated, there is probably a better way to write it. Perhaps it was the way the tag line was laid out but the first thing that popped into my mind after reading it was Paul Rudd teaching Jason Segel how to surf in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There is a fine balance between doing too much, trying to do less and actually not doing anything. Jason and Paul seemed to find it so I knew that if I set my mind to it while learning to code, I would get there as well.