Made a quick chicken cutlet for dinner and onto the orientation. Very basic entry requirements. Know the internet and interested enough to Google the things you don't know.
5:08 pm
Quick introduction with Miriam - she rocks as a community organizer. Very friendly and makes the nuts and bolts of the nanodegree as easy as possible.
Here's something new, in the forums (does this work in SquareSpace?) enter three backticks ``` and the type of code to create markup...the backtick is by the tilda on the upper left of your keyboard.
```html
<b>mark me up <em>baby!</em></b>
```
guessing that's not going to show as grey-back-field markup...
Accepting the honor code...
5:14 pm
Shout out to Dawoon...All hail...warning to work on the degree a little bit every day (2 hours per day, 10 hours per week). A great blog post on Acing Your Online Course: http://blog.udacity.com/2014/09/top-study-tips-for-online-courses.html
Orientation complete
5:18 pm
Moving forward ...very slowly...Last day of registration. I imagine the Udacity servers are working over-time.
On to How Learning to Code Works
We all begin learning at the stage of complete novice. By the time one is an expert one asks, "Why was this ever hard?" ha! ain't it the truth..
Asked to think of something I'm an expert in...I chose raising a toddler then laughed at myself. That's not true, so I'm settling on changing a diaper. Fairly decent at that task at this point in my life.
Moving through the stages of expertise from Ignorance, awareness, ability to fluency.
Andy speaking on the inevitable frustration of learning to program. #truth Avoid frustration turning into confusion, despair, terror...or other awful emotions.
Project0 just came back. Reviewed in less than one hour (give or take). That's very awesome, especially for new students completely unfamiliar with coding! Udacity really focuses on their students. I may sound like a fanboy, and I am, but I've also seen the tweaks in the system first hand. This is a very adaptable company and they work hard to give students the best experiences possible.
Finished How Learning to Code Works...now on to Stage1.
5:38 pm
Two reasons why we code, as stated by Andy, and reasons I completely agree with.
For the thrill of writing code to tell a computer what to do and then watching the computer actually do it.
Because we hate repetition
Finished Introduction to Stage1...now on to 1.1 The basics of Web and HTML...this is actually the first lesson with Steve all over again. Great if you're a student who may have got busy for a week and need a refresher. I just completed this so moving on to 1.2
5:50 pm
1.2 Creating a structured document.
Best to work through the videos with the instructors of this piece...
Let's take some notes here:
- HTML and CSS (and JavaScript) are programming languages
- HTML controls the structure of the Web page
- CSS controls the style of the page. Thus Cascading Style Sheets
- The DOM or document object model refers to the tree-like structure of a page
Took a quick stand up and sit down break. About 45 minutes left for today's work...
6:14 pm
Basically, HTML is the structure of the website, CSS puts on the color and makes it look pretty, and JavaScript gives the site functionality. The DOM is defined as a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML. The nodes of every document are organized in a tree structure, called the DOM tree.
Favorite word of the day, "Boxify"
laughing out loud, seriously. 6:22
The program recommends Sublime 2, but I've moved onto GitHub's Atom 1.0 now. Open source driven. It's going to surpass Sublime's functionality in a matter of months.
Finished 1.2 and now on to the first work session.
6:31 pm
Added notes to Stage0 html. Wrapping up for a few hours.
7:09 pm