GitHub assignment: https://github.com/tatyanaberdan/hello-world

Codeacademy profile: https://www.codecademy.com/tatyanaberdan

To start off, I want to reflect on my experience coding for the first time with Codeacademy. Although I’ve heard from many people (and although we said as much in class last week) that learning to code is like learning a new language, I was surprised at how true that turned out to be as I was going through the Codeacademy lessons. It felt like learning the basic sentence structure of a foreign language. I was also surprised at how easy the program made it to learn the different HTML tags, and I really like that the site gives you the ability to practice each element you learn. The Mindy McAdams reading emphasized the importance of consistent practice when it comes to learning to code — specifically, not spending more than two days without coding — and practice will definitely be key for me as I go through this process. I’m looking forward to tackling bigger projects and learning how to create more features with HTML and eventually the other languages.

I’m also excited to start using GitHub for projects so I can get a better understanding of how the site works. I found the tutorial and assignment difficult to follow without an actual project, but I think that will change once we start assignments.

In terms of the readings, the house analogy in the Rowan University course reading was the part that really stood out to me. It was a simple way of putting all of the different elements — the server, HTML, CSS, etc. — together to understand how they interact with each other. However, I’m still a little unclear about what databases are and how exactly they serve as the foundation in the house?

The reading on web inspectors also stood out as a good basic intro to using the tool. It built on a lot of what we talked about last class. While I think I understand web inspectors, I’m still confused about the definition of web scraping – what is web scraping used for? Is the data web scraping collects on the code and structure of the site or on the actual contents?