This week was the first week to delve into the first exercise of coding and learning more about HTML. I really enjoyed the exercise and the steps I took to create the final outcomes. It was a little frustrating in the beginning to get something wrong because I forgot to add a comma or a “>”. Then I came to realize that every single symbol, letter, and space matter — which is crucial in our field of work — and the importance of attention to details in coding. Also, the organization and the neatness of the code and the spaces used are essential to the final product. I am very excited to get started with CSS because I am really interested in developing more knowledge about design, which is as important — if not more important — than the content.

One of the readings shows a great analogy of building a website and building a house. The analogy helped me understand the layers of work that go into putting together a house apply in the same way we put together pieces to have the final product of a website. This understanding of structure helps journalists in laying out their work and creating that final piece of work.

I found it most interesting to learn more about the browser’s web inspector. We started the exercise in class but I got more into it this week with the readings. I was playing around with different pages and looking at the HTML code. I found it very helpful that you can hover over the code and it will highlight on the website to show you where it is. I am also fascinated by the back-end work of websites.

I am excited to be learning more about the various structures of a website in the next few weeks and see how these are out together to create the final product.

My main takeaways from this week’s readings were simplistic descriptions and analogies by Mindy McAdams on programming. Her conversational approach to programming and code were particularly refreshing and easy to grasp. The next article and its Website=House analogy and it’s picturesque slides made it more comprehensible. Also the introductions of elements, attributes and structure of tags (open <p> and closed </p> tags) and how the concept can be related to our everyday lives was so helpful.

I think the most abusive tool for me this week was the web inspector. I have umpteen times checked and changed the HTML of several websites just to see how what will happen and it was a pretty cool experience :). Sarah disagrees lol. Codecademy’s split screen for instructions, coding and display shows in real time how the tag hierarchy relates to each other and how a glitch in the arrangement can alter the whole hierarchy. Their website is beginner-friendly, with hints to help you along the way should you get stuck on an exercise. GitHub seem pretty straight forward with the creation of a repository and committing to projects. I hope to explore and learn more about its operations as the course progresses in the weeks ahead.

This week’s assignment was good. It rekindled my burning frustration with forgetting to close p tags, but the Codecademy setup was so intuitive that my questions were resolved almost immediately. I remember using W3 for learning to code in one undergrad course, and the user-friendly nature of this homework workflow (at least, so far) is far easier than editing in a notepad locally and refreshing the page.

Another point of reflection I’d note was the music. In fact, it was quite funny because I immediately thought of music (basic seven notes) before the actual guitar reference. Bringing things into perspective is a lot better for digesting. Just like learning a basic 2-chord song (HTML) for starting off is better than introducing a beginner to jazz standards (JavaScript). Whenever I try to encourage other people to play an instrument they’re reluctant about picking up, I often tell them to think about what they want to do rather than start off worrying how to do it. It appears the same logic is applied here.

I do agree, as you noted, you’ve got to practice a decent amount every day to build your skills and grow without forgetting too much in between down time. That’s not unlike music (or Mandarin and Spanish, which I haven’t practiced in years and have thus forgotten.) I’m glad that the Code Academy assignments allow you to reset them for practicing them further.

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Regrading our websites, I would want to make a music review site where music is catalogued by genre>artist>album>year. It would be a mix of niche interest, personal and business. I already have some form of cross-page organization in mind in addition to that general hierarchy I just mentioned. The purpose of the website would be to show album art, an artist’s full discography, include references (at the bottom of each page) to similar artists and other purposes. I think it’s somewhat of a wiki page that is more in-depth, adding personal review sections as supplementary elements after straight factual info.

When overviewing the article going over some of the more prominent coding languages throughout the decades, it made even more apparent my lack of previous experience with web development. The only one I had recognized by name was Java. More than anything, it was just interesting to see the coding languages evolve throughout the years alongside technology that precedes and coincides with the gradual evolution of the web and internet. I was most surprised that different companies kept developing and expanding existing technology from other companies in a competitive sort of manner, as opposed to the same companies redesigning their own information. As a millennial, older people are always telling you that you’re very lucky and fortunate to grow up with the internet and all these capabilities due to technology. I did not know previously what exact year “The Web” was born, and it is slightly mind-blowing to learn that it was created right before I was born.

Another portion of the reading I enjoyed was part two of computational thinking and journalism. Specifically, when there was a quote regarding comparing everyday actions and computational actions. Comparing buying your own set of skis instead of renting is comparable to online algorithms.

I’ve found the learning curve for programming as an overbearing writer to be both challenging and potentially rewarding.

Of course, there are the similarities in thought processes between copy editors and programmers (e.g., Brian Schlansky using his editing habits to carefully read each line of code). And, as a large portion of the “Rethinking our Thinking” post cleverly and reasonably detailed, coders are in many ways like editors. But copy editors are often the worst enemies of writers.

Some of the 17 rules of Unix Philosophy are anathema to the laws of good writing (Melville, Churchill, etc.). “Clarity is better than cleverness” and “Design for simplicity” to name a few. Having the habit of condensing lines to the bare necessities — and potentially breaking the entire code with a single character out of place — is also frightening to writers, yet common workflow for coders.

What I see as potentially rewarding is the benefit that journalists could gain in learning from programmers. Software languages — like human languages — have developed from Autocode to iOS, and that matters because we as future programmers should know that everything is fluid and able to continually evolve. And although coding often requires linear, step-by-step thinking (similar to the infrastructure of the internet) when compared to writing that is often tangental and more loosely flowing from beginning to end, there is still a progression of thought and purpose for the finished product.

After completing the readings, I still don’t believe that writers are programmers. But I do believe that writers and programmers have the capacity to be journalists. I have faith that the end goal of both draws on some common ground between the diametrically opposing belief systems. When writers use their words and images to tell stories, programmers rely on design and page hierarchy to tell you what’s important. Perhaps, just as there are many forms of writing, a visually appealing article page could be equally as effective in enlightening and entertaining an audience — even when compared to a Shakespearean play? Ah! There’s the rub.

When reading through the progression of programming languages, I had heard of many of them but never knew what they were or that there were even different programming languages. Though that reading outlines the key traits of each programming language, it was difficult for me to conceptualize without actually seeing them in action. The tree connecting the different programming languages, other than signifying when each was created, wasn’t too helpful in understanding the relation between them either.  That is one reason why it was difficult to know which of the programming languages I’m most interested in learning about, as I do not fully understand the differences and pros and cons of each.

Your blog post on mindset and thinking and how they relate to each other was the most interesting of our readings for me. Having a psychology background from underground, I’m reading a book right now that is actually called Mindset, based on research by Carol Dweck. Without getting too sidetracked, her research deals with how your mindset affects different outcomes in your life. More specifically, people with fixed mindsets tend to view their abilities as unchanging, while people with growth mindsets view their abilities as malleable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who view their abilities — whether it is academic or athletic or whatever else — as malleable find more success. For example, someone who figures they just are not a math person will struggle with math. Whereas someone who may not be very good at math, but who thinks he or she can improve, will often do better.

And yet, almost subconsciously, I’ve always had an intimidation of coding and programming. In the same way that some people (wrongly) think they are simply not cut out to do math, I never even entertained the idea of coding because I figured you had to be a real computer person to get good at it. Which is why the most comforting and encouraging thing to hear last night was that Greg did not have any sort of coding background either.