This week was a crazy week for me. I was in Philadelphia for the Asian American Journalists Conference and did not work on my project as much as I would have liked to, which means I need to be as productive as possible this week with my web page.

As Greg told me in my last blog post, I need to figure out how to override and add the CSS into my child theme and go directly to the plugin.

I still need to figure out localhost problems. Since my website has a lot to due with audio, I need to embed my Soundcloud links onto my website. It is really frustrating considering that my localhost also was not working 2 weeks ago. There’s so many roadblocks sometimes in this unknown world I decided to venture into.

I have not been coding nearly as much as I should. It’s going to be crunch time for me. I plan on adding more CSS, embedding the Soundcloud audio, and choosing my child theme. It’s confusing doing code sometimes without the help of Codecademy or an HTML validator. I’ve been trying to navigate FTP FileZilla with everyone emailing each other back and forth. It’s been helpful, but I’m hoping to make more progress this week.

It’s nerve-racking and confusing. I’m so confused sometimes by this project, but I’m hoping with hard work, I’ll be able to accomplish what I need to do.

Overall, this week will be the end-all-be-all and I hope I can do everything I can to make this project truly great. I know that anything worthwhile will have lots of challenges, and I have plenty here so all I can do is my best.

When looking back on this summer course, there are definitely things that I wish I knew better before I started. When I signed up for this class, I knew it would probably be challenging but I didn’t fully realize how time consuming it would be. I feel like some expectations were levied that I didn’t fully recognize, or understand. And given the past few weeks I have some suggestions for making the class better.

First and foremost, this should not be a summer course. There’s too much in the syllabus alone to justify the course being taught on a shortened scale. Either the objectives of the class need to be simplified, like taking out the project management week and extending the time spent learning JavaScript, or it need to be a longer course.

Second, the class needs a TA. Like the other technical classes I’ve taken, it’s paramount to have someone go through and make sure you’re actually clicking the right buttons and understanding the concepts before the class moves on. Only having one person there makes it really hard to do that, so a teaching assistant needs to be in the class if we aren’t going to go over the nuts and bolts.

Finally, I think expectations need to be managed on both sides more before this class is taught again. I know many people in the class, like myself, felt like things moved too quickly and not enough time was spent actually going through concepts we learned. For the most part it just seemed like a sprint to touch on any possible thing that could exist in web development. Instead, I think the course should correct and only teach more of the basics. Codecademy was useful for some things, like CSS and PHP, but it wasn’t a good use of time to work multiple hours on something that we then never really touched again, like jQuery.

Overall, I was able to learn some things in this class, but oftentimes I was more frustrated than excited about what I was learning. The class needs to be essentialized for PR professionals and journalists. While I appreciate that there were good intentions to get everyone familiar with web development, it needs to be scaled back before I could honestly recommend it to a classmate, especially one with a full-time job.

My overall thoughts for this class are all over the place. I have felt many emotions throughout the process, but am glad to be on the other side. At first I felt completely overwhelmed and lost. I then turned to getting frustrated and mad. Then I taught myself that all you really need to do is have a clam temper and think about things the way a developer would. I think that this was my key to success in for the final project.

Instead of thinking extremely hard, I brought it down to my own level. For example, when I wanted to put a contact form at the bottom of each of my pages, i thought about how that might look. At first I was thinking too big picture and that I would need to put the code into each individual page. Instead, I took a step back and realized that if I put it into the footer of the page, that was automatically already formatted to be placed on each page and therefore I wouldn’t have to write code in various places.

This class was a good example of the quote, “work smarter, not harder.” I was making things way too hard and have taught myself a new perspective on what it takes to create code.

My portfolio turned out to be much better than I expected. I didn’t have very high ambitions at the beginning, but when my code started working, I got very excited and wanted to keep adding more. It was weirdly addicting — kind of like when you finally get a really hard math problem right. You are very proud of yourself and want to show off what you can do.

This skill has already brought so much into my career. I was the hit of the day when I created a “Fake News” picture on the New York Times website by using the inspect tool and changing the title of something and sent it to my team at work. Working in PR for Federal IT clients, they are often talking about GitHub, and I am now aware of the types of tools they are using and can explain the lingo to my colleagues.

I am very thankful that I took this class and didn’t give up. There was a moment there when I truly contemplated it. I learned a lot, and most importantly, will be able to use it in my career.