Bootcamp journal - HTML, CSS and accessibility
I'm Jen and I’m in my mid-30’s, making a career change into tech. I'm on Manchester Codes’ Software Engineering FastTrack course - a part-time, 24-week bootcamp based in Manchester, UK.
What did I learn this week?
Second week of bootcamp. The pace is already starting to ramp up.
In my previous blog post I talked in detail about the format of the course and what we covered in the first week - if you missed that, you can read it here. Most of our learning this week continued to be self-led, with an evening lecture covering Git basics and a talk by a Manchester Codes graduate who is now a developer. It was really good to hear from someone who has made a successful career change.
Early in the week, we were set a target to get to a certain point in the online material by the end of the week and I found myself having to work hard to reach it. A challenge, but I got there.
I don't know about you, but when I'm learning something new, I like to make sure I really understand it before I move on to the next thing. I am already learning that there probably isn't going to be time for that in a bootcamp setting. (The clue is in the name, I guess!) I am happy that I have made the realisation now, in week two, rather than a couple of months in. I will adjust my expectations accordingly.
On that note, I will keep this blog post brief...
What did the course cover in week two?
HTML - a comprehensive study of HTML, which ranged from the history of the internet (which I loved), how browsers work, how HTML, CSS and JavaScript interact, through HTML basics and semantic HTML. We used our new knowledge to create two basic websites and publish them to GitHub pages
The Document Object Model (DOM) - we learned what it is and what it does
Accessibility - another comprehensive study, this time learning how to adapt web pages to make them accessible for everyone. Google's accessibility guide was a great intro
CSS - we covered CSS basics, the box model and flexbox (there's more to come on CSS next week). Flexbox froggy was good fun. Flexbox Zombies is another cracker.
Chrome Dev Tools - learned how to use Chrome Dev Tools to their full advantage by following the Google tutorial
Created an 'About Me' webpage - at the end of the week, we took all we had learned about HTML, CSS and accessibility to create and style a personal webpage, incorporating a number of compulsory features, such as links, images and buttons. Great fun!
What's to come next week?
JavaScript
