Codecademy Reflection

Codecademy Reflection

 

Prior to making an account on Codecademy, I did not have any experience with actual coding myself, just what my brother had told me about Python, another coding language, although this and HTML, which we used on Codecademy, are different from one another, perhaps I will be more accustomed to figuring out Python in the future if I want to learn more coding skills. From just the few units that we covered on Codecademy, I can see how useful it is to have an understanding of even basic coding and how programming languages work. Coding is the language of computers, and of the internet, universally spoken by all who use it, even if we do not realize this fully. This is why I knew I would be interested in the coding aspect of this course right from the beginning, because I wanted to gain an understanding of this language and how it works, even if I just have a basic one for the time being.

I think the way Codecademy’s developers set up the site works perfectly for beginners such as myself, and probably at least a few others in our class. The left side of the work space on the screen provides clear instructions on how to complete each individual exercise, and although there were several occasions throughout completing these units where I ran into many different types of problems with formatting, mistyping something, generally being lost, etc., I worked through my problem each time, and I found that taking some time away from the site and coming back to it with a clear head was a good solution, or at the least, allowed me to ease my stress and work towards learning more and more about HTML and CSS. The thing I noticed about HTML and CSS is that not everything needs to be one hundred percent precise, and as long as the commands are entered in correctly, the user has some wiggle room on spacing and formatting.

I was happy to see that once I started a lesson on Codecademy, I could quit and resume working on it very easily because my work was automatically saved upon exiting the site, and I could continue from right where I left off when I logged in on my next visit. This makes the website user-friendly, and allowed me to never feel too overwhelmed by everything, even though we did cover a pretty large amount of topics with Codecademy. Having completed the HTML and CSS course for this class, I very well may return to the site later on and continue my education on coding, and even though not all the courses are free, the skills I can learn from this site are invaluable to me, and I can implement them far beyond what we did in this class, and I hope that eventually, coding is taught to children. Codecademy does this in a fun, interactive way, and I think this would be perfect for young minds.

The first exercise was one of the most useful because it taught me how to create my own website, complete with images and links. Although the format for this first site I created was simple, when I got into CSS after the HTML units were finished, this allowed me to practice with stylesheets, which give the user’s site more character with font sizes, styles, and colors, classes and IDs, and several other elements. These exercises taught me the ways in which we personalize our websites to make them unique, and upon going back to some seemingly complex elements of some of my favorite sites, I can start to see how web developers give sites their flair, and I am glad that most web browsers allow one to view sites in HTML format, so that we can see how these sites are built.

Website design seems to have grown in importance increasingly since the inception of the world wide web, and developers on the cutting edge of web development are creating new and innovative site designs every day, but they all got their start by learning coding languages such as HTML and CSS, and that is inspiring to me. A single great idea can lead to a revolutionary website, such as Google, Facebook, and many of the other sites used by millions, and this idea or ideas are executed through the use of coding, and this is something that did not exist thirty years ago. The millennial generation is not responsible for the creation of the web, but we are finding new ways to use it that its creators probably had not even imagined, whether it be tweeting about seemingly mundane things, forming online communities and identities, and an endless amount of other uses/applications.

By the end of the course I completed on Codecademy, and after transferring my work there to a usable website, I feel that I have grasped the first few fundamentals of coding, when it comes to HTML and CSS at least. Before taking this Writing for The World Wide Web course, I had not formally been introduced to coding, and I had been interested in it previously, but using Codecademy and completing the exercises on a regimented schedule kept me on track, and I learned a new skill with each lesson completed, so I am thankful that this was included in the course. My goal is to continue my coding education well after this class, and Codecademy has given me a good start to this goal.