Self-paced coding training and/or activities:
- Completed Lynda course: CSS to Sass: Converting an Existing Site. My write up on this course is here.
- Completed Lynda course: Fireworks CS5: Essential Training
- I don’t know that I needed to complete this, considering it was the longest of all the courses I’ve added to a playlist to listen to later. As I followed along I noticed a lot of the shortcuts and practices are similar to Photoshop, which I’m decent with. So hopefully it will make the transition back easy. I’m really mostly interested in using this program for quick wireframing. I tried last year to use InDesign and it felt like I was spending too much time on it. Photoshop does not have a pages feature, if there were a plugin for that I’d probably use it. For now I think Fireworks will be sufficient for my own personal wireframing and client work I HOPE to do in the near future. I’m sure that will all change if I’m working on a team that utilizes other resources but at least I know how to rapidly learn a new tool.
- Completed Lynda course: CSS: Frameworks & Grids
- Reaffirmed all of my own conclusions about using frameworks and introduced me to some that I had not heard. A good portion of the course was dedicated to working around existing framework styling and things to look out for in development, which I encountered while working with Bootstrap for the FreeCodeCamp tribute page. The instructor provided this link to some of the frameworks he explored although much of the course revolved around Foundation.
- Watched Lynda course: WordPress Workflows. Mostly focused on Chapter 3: Building a Custom Site for Yourself or a Client
- Watched Lynda course: WordPress: Developing with Sass and Grunt.js. Mostly focused on Chapter: 4: Building Themes from Scratch with _s and Sass since I’m not quite at the point where I’m implementing Grunt into my workflow. Will revisit later.
- Completed Lynda course: Fireworks CS5: Rapid Prototyping
Reading Materials:
- Get Your Side Projects Done
- A Story of My First “Client” Who Changed My Life … this is sort of the boost I need for upcoming development
- Learning to Code: When It Gets Dark
- Naming CSS Stuff is Really Hard
- About HTML semantics and front-end architecture
- Let’s Kill Semantic HTML
- What is screen resolution and why does it matter?
Coding Meetups/Events:
- No meetups this week but I did slide through a nice Salesforce related happy hour. I’m kind of in a post #Lemonade slump… the visual album is AWESOME but awakened some parts of me and subsequently I’m in a slump. So I need to deal with these emotions in order to move forward and until then… slump it is. Funny how that works.
Plans for next week
- Lynda Course: WordPress: Building Responsive Themes
- Lynda Course: Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals
- I might take peek into the myriad of Git & Github resources on Lynda.com
- Develop theme for wt project called “Lips” and launch site
- Craft my own starter theme from the _s WP starter theme, implementing sass
- Either redesign this site’s blog or shesgottawriteit.com
- Return to FreeCodeCamp and complete some of the assignments there
2 comments on “This Week in Coding: #004”
Do you like Lynda course ?
yes! i like being able to follow along that way, one way I’m able to learn and code at the same time. It’s helpful for certain skills where you just need to get up and running but I haven’t tried it for any actual programming languages yes, although there are courses for JS