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The day started out pretty frustratingly, as I could not complete a fairly simple challenge. There was some issues with the website we were using, which threw me off, however I mentally got stuck and couldn’t get unstuck. It would have been ideal to have changed tasks, maybe even getting up for 5 minutes. I did not do take that advice. I continued into a 30 minute stagnation of thought. The day got much better after that first 1.5 hours.
The day was primarily spent diving into CSS concepts. My comfort level with CSS is pretty high, so this material was good review. The other thing that I appreciated was having discussions on why somethings worked . There are coding decisions that I’ve used in the past that work, but I never knew the logic behind the code. A perfect example is getting something to center on a page using:
.container {
margin: 0 auto;
}
I have also have challenges in the past to get this to work, but now I understand that a container that you want to float should have a defined width. The container that encloses that container also works best when it has a defined width.
Another topic that we covered, that I have used for years but struggled with at times and only get to work through brute force and trial and error is floating an object. Getting things to position themselves via float, is still something that takes some trial and error, but at least I have a little better understanding.
The other thing that I realize even more after the day’s work, is that I appreciate Twitter Bootstrap even more. I have been using it for any of the CSS work that I have had to do the past year. It really does make life so much easier than building the style sheet from scratch. We haven’t got into Bootstrap yet, but it’s on the schedule.
At the end of classes today we set up our Ruby environments, as we are going to start working with Jekyll next.