Wow. It has been a very BUSY last two weeks. Almost everyday, we learn an entirely new concept. I’m going to be using this blog to document what I am learning. It’s going to be a crazy ride for sure, but it’s starting to get exciting.
We were introduced to the DOM, aka the “Document Object Model”. I had never heard of the DOM before this week, but I learned why it is so important to programming. We practiced using JavaScript (with the DOM) to build and style pages—no CSS.
We also learned about event handlers in JavaScript. These add actions and behaviors to web pages. This is where things got really exciting for me. With event handlers, we can make real activity happen. Right now, I’m just adding click actions, but we worked on building a piano keyboard and toggling stoplight colors.
Finally, we met Bootstrap. Best introduction yet. Building CSS from scratch was cumbersome for me, and Bootstrap is so much faster. It’s a CSS framework with lots of goodness built in so I just have to come up with really snazzy HTML. I’m still learning the ins and outs of Bootstrap, and I need to understand the framework better, but it’s been great so far.
One of the Galvanize members, Jochen Wolters, came to speak to us during a “Lunch and Learn” this week. He talked about UI/UX design and demonstrated the importance that we, as developers, have to understanding how it works. He also emphasized how we need to be ensure there is good communication between design and development teams. I love how his talk was about how “tech meets the end-users”. We really have to consider how our work will be functional for users (humans). If we build programs for end-users, this critical.
You can click here to view his presentation on SlideShare.
Another thing I’ve been working with more is GitHub. Versioning is so important!
My motto this week: Build more stuff!