I walked out of the February 12 class feeling somewhat positive that I could rock this gallery assignment. I quickly found out that feeling would not last as long as I would have liked it to when I was put to the test to do the gallery assignment on my own. During Tuesday’s class, my eyes were glued to the screen as my instructor went through HTML and the pseudocode for JavaScript. With Codecademy as my resource and a head start on the gallery assignment, I was not going to accept defeat. This assignment was going to be the best one yet, as so I thought!
Here is a run-down of what happened this week following the Tuesday class:
Wednesday: JavaScript lesson review
Thursday: jQuery Codecademy review
Friday: reviewed class lecture on Google Drive
Saturday: stared at pseudo code, used YouTube as a resource
Sunday: felt confident, reviewed gallery pseudo code, felt stressed, emailed instructor, desperately emailed 2 classmates for help, met up with 1 classmate, did my best to throw something together, felt defeated
Ultimately, my goal was to meet the deadline, but I became frustrated when I could not figure out how to get my buttons to work. One of the biggest lessons learned from this week’s assignment is that there is not a right way to create a finished product. I believe that my biggest mistake was overthinking that I was not doing the assignment the right way. There are so many ways to get to the final product!
I watched plenty of videos on how to create a gallery and noticed that a few people would use the hide feature in CSS instead of using this feature in JavaScript. Is there typically best practices of when to use CSS or JavaScript? I think it also confused me when I saw HTML, CSS, & JavaScript in one file of code. Do beginners separate the files to understand how each language functions or do some developers separate the files to keep everything organized?
Although I felt very defeated from this assignment, I am not going to let that get me down. I accept the challenge to eventually understand jQuery & JavaScript at the most proficient level that a beginner can be!
Glad to hear your spirits are still high! You did well and these feelings are all natural.
To answer your question, it’s generally preferred to separate each language into its own file for ease of reading and updating — as well as abstracting different pieces to use across files (e.g. CSS and JS).