This is a collaborative environment
What I think I know after studying web development for one month.
I still don’t know what it is I’ve fully gotten myself into with web development, but one thing that’s been made clear in my time as a student in Perpetual Education is that whatever web design is, it’s at the very least...maybe even at a fundamental level?…an extremely collaborative space. Looking at HTML documents that other people wrote has been really helpful in reinforcing certain concepts. What I’ve realized about this collaborative environment is that it’s not only how you get things done, it’s how you learn how to do it.
This has been for me one of the hardest parts of learning a new field. For most of my life, I’ve worked mostly by myself, and indeed, grad school has made me accustomed to and comfortable with working alone. I don’t know if that’s been everyone’s graduate school experience, but it’s largely been mine. I do love working alone. This isn’t surprising to me. I like being alone. But I’ve reached a stage in my journey where I see that to really get better at coding for the web, I need to share my knowledge and experience with others, and allow them to share their knowledge and experience with me. I can continue to learn HTML on my own, but to learn how HTML is useful in the real world, I know I need to talk and work with other people.
As an example, one of the amazing things about being a student in Perpetual Education is being able to see the webpages of other students. I am blown away each week when I see how a student is able to design and style a webpage using basic HTML and CSS. It’s also made me realize that visual design is not one of my strong suits at the moment. It’s not that I don’t want to learn visual design. I actually have a strong interest in making pixel art with Affinity Designer, but for right now, learning how to make something look good is something I’m weak in, but more importantly it’s something I didn’t know I was weak in until I studied the work of others with others. Fortunately though, I know it’s something I can get better in because it’s through the work of others, that I now have a growing library of reference and study material.
I know I need to do a better job reaching out and discussing site design and code with others. I will get better at it. I’m glad to have only realized this a month in.
All of this is probably stuff the instructor at Perpetual Education mentioned really early on, but it’s stuff that didn’t click with me until recently.
This is a collaborative environment
When the internet was young, you could see everything!
Now, with layout/page-builder applications and tools like React and minifiers and Shadow DOM, it's really hard to learn from other people's code. Not to mention, a lot of the code is really bad.
So, it was really important to us to have a classic FTP system so that the students can all learn from each other's code - without the barrier of GitHub. I think it has been really successful. And we'll get to Git soon enough.
Keep up the great work!