Weekly Update #4 - Finishing Coding Projects, Freewriting and Reading

This is the second article I'm writing today (and I have to edit and publish another one later), so I'm sorry if I make some mistakes or I write sentences that don't really make sense, I'm a little tired!

In this update I'm gonna talk about (you guessed it) coding, about two small projects I finished this week, about freewriting (which I did just a few minutes ago before starting to write this article) and about reading.

I'd like to thank @felt.buzz for sharing my last weekly update on twitter and @fitinfun for all the support and for telling me about freewriting, from that I just got a good idea for a future fantasy/futuristic/post-apocalytic story that I may write. But I'm gonna talk about that in the last section of this update!

So, let's start with Coding!

This week was actually pretty good in terms of coding!

Last week I finished working on the Product Landing Page challenge from FreeCodeCamp, and after a lot of work I managed to make that page look decent, and work both on desktops and on mobile devices.

This week was, overall, a lot better. The first challenge I had to work on was a "Technical Documentation Page". Basically, a technical documentation page is a simple website that has multiple topics that are well documented, with a lot of useful information on them. In programming, a technical page usually contains definitions of the syntaxes used in a certain programming language, or information about how certain functions work, etc.

I had to create a similar page, and while I initially thought about putting a lot of information into it, I realized really quickly that I shouldn't. First, the information I was putting in is easy to find using Google anyway. Second, the idea behind the challenge wasn't for me to create a page that would contain information already available somewhere else, but to be able to simply built the page.

So that's what I did, and in around a day of coding (~3 hours) I managed to create this simple Technical Documentation Page: https://codepen.io/opreadorin1/full/bZwbrW

It obviously works both on Desktop and on Mobile, and, as before, I used HTML and CSS (mainly Flexbox) to create it. Since I didn't add a lot of information and no "fancy" interactions, there was no need to also use jQuery so I skipped the language and created something a lot simpler.

Then, the next challenge (and the final one), required me to create a Portfolio page. I got quite excited about that, since I will want to create a personal website for myself sometime in the future, after I get better at web design and development, so I was eager to start working on it.

Thing is, while I really wanted to create something amazing, I realized I may not be able to, because of my lack of knowledge related to JavaScript and other technologies that would be needed to make the page look really good.

So, in order to avoid the frustration I would've felt if I would've tried to create a really high quality page, I decided to go for something that I could make using what I know right now: HTML, CSS and some jQuery.

So, I started working on it after I created a simple design on paper, and, to my surprise, I finished everything quite fast. I created most of the layout using HTML and CSS on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I worked mainly on adding content to the page ( some of my projects ) and some effects that took me a little to figure out how to actually create.

Overall, the page looks, in my opinion, decent, and works well both on Desktop and Mobile, which I'm really happy about, because years ago, when I first started creating websites, I had huge problems with making them work on mobile devices. Now, with CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid, that's really easy to do.

You can view the Portfolio Page here: https://codepen.io/opreadorin1/full/Gerjaw

With all that being said, and with those projects finally being done, I can say that I completely finished the entire "Responsive Web Design Certification (300 Hours)" course on FreeCodeCamp! It took me around a month to finish it, but it was worth taking my time, because I learned A LOT from it, especially from the challenges I had to complete.

Yesterday I started working on the next course, called "Javascript Algorithms And Data Structures Certification (300 hours)", which, obviously, will teach me JavaScript. I spent 2 hours yesterday (Thursday) completing a part of the first subsection of the course called "Basic JavaScript", and another two hours today, this way finishing almost half of it.

I'm really glad that I remember a lot more than I expected about JavaScript and that a lot of the things I've been relearning until now are fairly simple because of that. However, later in the course I'll have to take my time and try to understand certain concepts that I couldn't comprehend at all years ago when I tried learning all this for the first time.

Thing is, this time I'm gonna take it easy and I'm gonna spend as much time as needed learning everything as well as I possibly can. I'm actually having fun learning and seeing things working, so that's even better!

But anyway, that's pretty much it about coding, so let's move to the next section!

I finally wrote my first freewriting article! And I even published it! You can find it here: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@raikuhen/5-minutes-freewriting-1-snapshot

For those of you who don't know what freewriting is, basically, it's setting up a 5 minute timer and writing about a random topic that you may choose from the promts @mariannewest is coming up with. That's it. Then you publish whatever you wrote.

@fitinfun told me about this a few times before, and while I tried to do it last week, I failed a few times, and after that I switched my attention to something else. This week however, I really wanted to write something, anything, and after a little bit of thinking, I realized that I could approach freewriting in a different way that could benefit me.

Instead of writing "useful" articles like I usually do, I could use freewriting to write fantasy pieces. I've been wanting to write fantasy stories for quite a while now, but I never had the proper amount of time. Once I start working on one piece, I am really dedicated and I don't want to spend time doing anything else, and right now I have other priorities.

So, freewriting was just what I needed - a way to write more articles once in a while, and to do something I wanted to do many times in the past - writing about fantasy.

I chose the "Snapshot" topic, and I came with a simple idea that helped me write the story I mentioned above - some sort of a post-apocalyptic future where "snapshop", which is usually defined as being "a casual photograph made typically by an amateur" is a technology that replicates the environment around a person by creating a similar image of that environment on a force field.

With all that in mind, I started writing, and while the initial piece was good, not only did I end up going over the 5 minute timer, but I also got very frustrated with the fact that some bird decided to make a lot of noise outside and completely ruin all my focus.

So, frustrated but willing to publish something, I started rewriting everything, this time, in silence. I kinda "cheated" a bit when it comes to that article, because while I spent around 5 minutes (I think I went over the timer for a few seconds) writing, I spent another 2-3 minutes searching for a good image that would represent what's in the text. But, since that's not against the rules, I won't take it into consideration.

There are two things that stood out for me while freewriting, things that impressed me a little about this activity: first, it was the frustration I felt for not being able to write for more than 5 minutes. It was a good thing, because I would've probably expected to be able to write an entire book in a day, which would've been impossible anyway, but it was nice to realize that I was frustrated for not being able to write more.

Second, it was both the focus and adrenaline rush I felt. The focus came from my desire to write everything as well and as detailed as possible, which I couldn't do because of the timer, and the adrenaline rush came from the fear of not being able to finish everything in time.

As I said, after the timer was over I did spend a few more seconds writing, to at least finish the final paragraph, because I couldn't let a short story like that without some sort of an ending.

The great thing about this experience is that while that short story is full of mistakes and lacks A LOT of really important details, I got into it so much that I had to save the idea somewhere to make sure that at some point in the future, when I'll have enough time at my disposal, I can write a much longer version of that short story.

All in all, it was a great experience, so thanks once again @fitinfun for telling me about freewriting!

Next and last topic, is gonna be reading. As I mentioned in the last weekly update, I want to start reading more, because I've been kinda neglecting that activity for a while now, being so focused on other things. This week I finally forced myself to read and to consume educational content.

And I'm glad I did.

I managed to read some really interesting articles that exposed me to some really interesting ideas. To avoid making this article even longer, I'm just gonna link them bellow, so you can read them for yourself if you wish:

1. Socrates on Wisdom: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/the-only-true-wisdom-is-in-knowing-you-know-nothing-5789c8994cc6

2. “The Art of Dying”: a valuable message from Bruce Lee about our ego: https://medium.com/@nicolas.rufino/the-art-of-dying-a-valuable-message-from-bruce-lee-about-our-ego-5411117da9d9

3. • How the Ancient Art of Wu Wei can Make You Calmer, Less Frustrated, and More Effective: https://medium.com/antidotes-for-chimps/how-the-ancient-art-of-wu-wei-can-make-you-calmer-less-frustrated-and-more-effective-bb694fcda019

The last one is a "premium" article, I'm not sure if people without a Medium account can read it, but I hope you can.

I also thought that it could be useful for myself if I would create a really simple and local web page on my computer with articles I read and like, so I can "store" the link to those articles somewhere in case I want to reread them in the future. I already lost a lot of articles I wanted to reread, and I'd like for that to not happen again. It's nothing complicated, but it's a small project I can work on that will help me in the future.

With all that being said, I'm gonna end this section here!

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Well that was it!

I didn't talk about 3D at all, mainly because I was focused on other things this week, but know that the third part of the scene is almost done, I just need to add a few more objects to make it look more realistic. Either that, or I'm gonna overreact with the details as I always do and I'm gonna have a lot more things to take care of. I'm gonna have to see.

But except that, there's not much else to talk about, so I guess I'll see you next week.

Thanks for reading!