Quite an easygoing week as staff settle into the workplace after a much-needed Christmas Break. I have to say that my holiday was very productive and in the same vein, the first work week has been successful for me as we look to revamp our website homepage for a fresh new look. This means some rapid prototyping and demos are needed, then we can discuss what data needs to be rendered on the front end. The deadline is the end of January and although I am sceptical about it, the learning I have done over Christmas has meant that I am not spending the first few work weeks re-learning common tasks so I can hit the ground running again.
I hope I can keep to my new year's resolution which isn't a coding-related aspiration- rather a mental and physical health one: I want to eat more healthily to lose weight and improve my energy levels and reduce fatigue throughout the day. I think this will come full circle when I see better output and higher productivity at the desk and still have the energy to spare at the end of the day. I think why people give up on their resolutions, is because they set too lofty goals. So, I'm tackling this by setting the bar very low: have one of the three meals in the day be a healthy, less-carby one and for the other two, reduce the amount. I think over time, I could achieve a weight loss of 5 - 10kg (but I won't put a timeframe on it just yet!)
On the coding side of things, I am towards the back end of Wes Bos' 30daystoJS free course- just walked through the Stripe follow-nav tutorials and have to say, this is the level to aspire to. Although it may seem complicated and you think to yourself perhaps, that you would never have come to the same solution, the main takeaway is to break down the problem into manageable steps and consolidate new knowledge that you wouldn't have learned from more simple tutorials or bootcamps. These intermediate or less common methods, keywords and data manipulation techniques show you how to take your program and make it more robust and less prone to bugs.
For work, it's been a lot of self-learning about building a masonry-style grid layout with different-sized cells, responsive re-sizing and performance monitoring. It's hard to achieve all of these when you come from a limited working knowledge of this specific design pattern. We are in the planning phase to understand how our CMS will get the data to the templating layer, in an automated and maintainable way. I asked around online for use cases, and methodical ways to approach this and I am satisfied I did this rather than seeking out answers independently. Because I ended up with two or three potential ways to create the layout: masonry.js which is open source and allows for fairly flexible designs- I've added to a repo and produced a proof of concept but there are still some teething issues to resolve. Alternatively, I will try a demo with native CSS grid properties (I've been recommended to look at grid-auto-flow) and see how that goes- I tend to move away from this route as I'm sure someone has implemented this layout before and built robust, maintainable code so I don't want to reinvent the wheel. As another option, I can look for more free JS libraries that produce a similar result.