The Iron Yard - Day 02

Day 02 of The Iron Yard has happened. I lived through it.

After learning several tidbits about CSS tricks and how to use floats and overflow, we had a daunting assignment. We were tasked to recreate the home page of Wordpress.com in various stages.

Honest Abe, I was a bit stunned at such a complex project.

Copying others is useful to get deeper down into the “how” of any skill. For instance, in my undergraduate music education days, my percussion professor, the illustrious Dr. Brian West, would require drumset students to listen to a song of our choosing and then transcribe the exact drumset part. We also had to perform it in front of our peers or in front of a panel of percussion teachers. This was time-consuming and difficult…and I loved it. I officially transcribed Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Billy Martin, all of which led me to many others to transcribe on my own.

Other things I learned today:

• How to use “em” versus “px” (though “rem” will be useful soon)
• Make boxes “float” left and right like a magnet
• More study of the CSS Box Model
• “box-sizing: border-box” (behavior which turns out is from very old IE!)
• Using “git” in the shell to upload projects to GitHub
• Installing new packages in Sublime Text

I definitely did not finish the homework by 10:00 PM as expected. I looked up from feverishly typing and hitting ⌘-⇥ then ⌘-R, realized it was 10:00PM and 30 seconds, and then sent my work to GitHub lickety split. Alas, by the time I submitted my GItHub link to our instructor, it was definitely 10:01 PM (at least on my laptop).

Nonetheless, I continued to work on the layouts, and finished what was expected about 12:15 AM. It has been submitted. I can sleep a little.

There were still two spacing issues in my layout where text was out of alignment for about 5px. Annoying, but I will figure it out.

Oh, we also found out that our instructor likes nutella (nutellahabit dot com)…perhaps it borders on obsession. Someone left an anonymous gift of a nutella snack-pack for him. Good move!

To Infinity and Beyond!

Written by Mike Mathew who lives and works in Dallas building useful things. Sometimes he posts on Mastodon. Mike also wears many hats at Presto Assistant where he is a co-founder, owner, and product engineer.