Day 4: Github collaboration, Twitter bootstrap, and more CSS.

I'm making great progress through the CSS portion of the class. After talking with some of the students from the previous cohort, what I'm feeling is about right. Things really start to pick up in the later weeks when we start learning Javascript and PHP. Not saying its a walk in the park right now. But if you've been committing around 12 hours a day at the Dojo like I have, you'd be in pretty good shape. I'm doing my best to keep up this good pace and not get burned out!

The morning lecture was about github collaboration. Michael went over how to create branches on the remote repository, how to merge when back on to the master branch, and how to deal with conflicts. Then it we were paired off and we practiced how to use github.

Our assignment was to work simultaneously on a project making changes to the repository and pushing them to github, all while making sure that we had the latest version of the accepted code. Furthermore, we had to intentionally create a code conflict and figure out how to edit the code so that the conflict was resolved. This activity was actually much more difficult than expected. It's not that the activity was particularly hard. But sometimes we would accidentally enter an incorrect command into the terminal and there was a lot of troubleshooting going on. Strength through struggle I guess!


I'm about 2 days ahead of schedule but Coding Dojo really has a lot of optional material that you can use to further your learning. I love this aspect about the Dojo because you can go at your own pace. The first optional assignment was learning Twitter Bootstrap. We'll definitely be going more in-depth with bootstrap, but right now we had the option of getting our feet wet. I wanted to create a personal website but I just decided to make a small website about Coding Dojo's curriculum.

Bootstrap's mobile-first responsive design is quite magnificent if I say so myself. It's no wonder its such a popular tool to use. It really makes me much more confident when tackling website design. Michael only wants us to be spending no more than 8 hours on bootstrap at this time as we are definitely going to be going more in depth when we make our projects.

After playing with bootstrap for about 7 hours, I decided to work on the second assignment to create a periodic table.

It seems really really easy however the catch is that you're not allowed to use tables at all. This assignment took me way longer than I expected it to. I ended up writing a lot more code than I wanted to. The output of my assignment is looking great but the underlying code looks pretty bad. Gotta definitely make it a habit of writing elegant code from the start. Of course that all comes with time and repetition.