As the Christmas season nears, it's a gradual wind-down of tasks or finishing jobs before the new year. It's been a quiet week trying to get sign-off on some webpage content build due to outstanding media assets and getting agreement on layouts. As part of the work contract agreement I have, the apprenticeship training brought up a familiar learning pattern where you get a design in the form of an image (or Figma file if you pay). Your challenge is to reproduce the design using whatever tools you want. I'm familiar with Frontend Mentor's setup, and I would recommend it to learners (< 1-year exp) to cut their teeth on front-end development. Although I find the projects lend themselves to using custom CSS and JS, you can use frameworks or libraries as an excuse to learn them. This familiarity meant I wasn't wasting time registering and understanding how to interpret the instructions or readme.md file. The project was the Blogr landing page, and my solution has some broken elements I still need to resolve, so I may go back to it in time to fix it.
But, I haven't been on FEM for a while, and that is because after doing about a dozen of them, usually on my weekends, I didn't find that my development productivity improved. Maybe I have hit a limit on my understanding of CSS and JS, and the challenges were not as fun anymore- it became more of a chore than a fun learning experience. Being in employment helped me realise that CSS is just part and parcel of a job as a developer and that there are more interesting and useful topics to learn, which I feel, with the same investment of time, reap more financial and career-satisfying rewards.
I have been progressing on CodeCademy's front-end engineer path and have set some manageable goals in my learning to achieve before the work year starts again. I want to achieve the following:
Complete the front-end engineer path as I think the e-learning platform was great when I started learning different topics from an introduction but realising now that I will never gain competency in any topic unless I build projects away from the comfort of the sandbox environment. I want to close down my account and rely on free learning resources (part of development is about researching well, and I believe there is a plethora of great free resources out there- it's just part of a network, and the resources come to you)
Start a Drupal Site for a local community club near me so that I can add a CMS project to my portfolio and showcase what I've learned in the workplace. Maybe one day I'll ask the community club whether they want to replace their live (albeit old) site with mine!
There's a JS jQuery book on my desk that's been there for almost a year, and I want to get through this content for some practice.