FreeCodeCamp Speedrun Number 2 ― The Landing Page

The tribute page project approximates the simplest web page of practical use. A landing page is only slightly more complex, but poses a problem that's somewhat more common when it comes to real world online marketing.

_{CC0 from Pexel/Pixabay}

In an earlier post, I offered an overview of Free Code Camp, a non-profit, interactive coding school where I rediscovered my excitement for software development. It's also a welcoming venue where many learners have discovered this passion for the first time.

The camp provides a number of projects for students to challenge themselves. In this series of blog posts I am revisiting these projects with an emphasis on speed.

My Second Speedrun ― Build a Product Landing Page

A landing page, or "lander", presents directed sales copy as a logical extension of an online ad with the goal of prompting the visitor to take a simple action. As an MBA I understand the objective. As a consumer I'm wary of such online marketeering myself.

But the question I pose to myself as a front-end developer is―how fast can I build that?

To be honest, the 1 hour and 38 minutes that it took me to build a Tribute to The American Alligator was both a surprise and a disappointment. It felt like such a simple web page should have been child's play.

Some reflection revealed a couple of the obstacles that held me back:

Perfectionism: While I never really got to a point where I was satisfied with the layout I realize that I had done the majority of the work in a few minutes and then spent the majority of the time tweaking small details that had far less impact on the overall outcome.

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Tooling: I did become distracted during the first speedrun by shortcuts in my development environment that did not work as I had anticipated.

One command line alias I'd meant to setup to clone my rjay website boiler plate had a typo. So, when I typed gitj and nothing happened I should have immediately proceeded to clone the repository the long way. This would have only taken a few extra steps. Instead I spent several minutes troubleshooting the alias itself. And even so I ended up taking the longhand approach anyway.

To be clear, tooling ones IDE to save time is worthwhile, but it did nothing to help my speedrun objective while the clock was running,

With these lessons learned in mind I changed my approach for the second project. This time I focused more on making the simplest change that satisfied each user story, even if it didn't result in a very pretty page. And it surely didn't.

Nevertheless, I think this is the correct way to proceed with the remaining projects, at least in the context of a speedrun. There are two reasons.

First, in a way it reflects an important aspect of planning for real-world projects. After all it is more important to deliver something that does the job, than a beautiful result that does the wrong job or―worse yet―doesn't work at all.

The list of user stories define the job that must be done. Fulfilling this minimum standard quickly permits more control over the balance of time applied to what could and should be done.

Second, I took note of an aspect emphasized in the way gamers speedrun. As noted on Wikipedia, "speedrunners often have to reason about the game differently from the way that ordinary players might."

As an exercise the same is true of speeding through a developer challenge. I needed to change my mindset from one of delivering a finished work to completing a representative abstraction in the shortest time that I can. I suppose it's a leap of faith that improving the latter lends something useful to the former.

Time will tell.

Results

It took me 1 hour, 7 minutes to complete the fifteen user stories for the landing page. This is only slightly faster than the 1 hour, 38 minutes taken for the nine similar tasks of the tribute project.

So, it was a modest improvement in terms of both speed and complexity. I am not altogether satisfied with either result. I've set a goal of getting those times down to 15 and 20 minutes, respectively.

For now though it's on to the remaining projects. The next post in this series will discuss what could have gone better as well as my attempt to build a simple survey form as fast as I can.

So far, I'm not aware of other Steemian-Codecampers undertaking speedruns. The very active, helpful (and frequently opinionated) Codecamper P1xt was the inspiration for my attempt though. P1xt also expresses an interest in speed studying generally.

As closing thoughts concerning the time frame of this endeavor, I intend to complete all five of the camp's Responsive Web Design project set during November 2018. I do hope to cover all projects in the camp's curriculum eventually. Each broad topic will be presented as a separate series of posts.

Previous Article

This article is the second in a series of speedruns based on the FreeCodeCamp certification projects. For the introductory post click here.

Links

• FreeCodeCamp
• My speedrun progress tracking repository
• The Landing Page Project ― completed in 1 hour, 7 minutes
• The Tribute Page Project ― completed in 1 hour, 38 minutes

GitHub Account

https://github.com/tdreid