…. there was a young lady that wanted to build something special.
Isn’t that how all stories start off? In the beginning? Well that is how this one starts too. As all good stories should.
My journey simply put started out of a desire to show off my kids, and allow my family near and far see my kids grow up. Soon after it turned into something quite different. A love of how websites work. How do you get that picture to be in just the right place on the page? How do you get the background to look just that right color or multiple colors? Learning on my own to create was fun, frustrating, and enlightening. Being in my 30’s at the time learning a new language was different. And to build a website with out the use use of templates does require the use of new languages. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. These are the essentials to any website, template or not. Knowing how they work together to create functional websites was a mystery for sometime.
I found the above picture to be such an eye opener, even if I did find it over 10 years after I started learning to code websites. I learned HTML and CSS pretty quick, as it is easier to inspect websites and see how the structure it created and you can see the colors of presentation. But that behavior part, the JavaScript, that one still to this day tends to kick my butt. My terrible spelling doesn’t help matters either when it comes to JavaScript as it is pretty particular about how things are spelled. As with any language there is a pattern, which once understood can make things much easier.
Someone else pointed out to me that creating websites, especially from scratch is its own form of art. I can take a ball of yarn and create a stuffed animal, I can grow a garden full of herbs, but I can’t draw. I always wanted to but just can’t do it. However creating websites has become a form of drawing for me. Knowing how to manipulate the code to place an image just where I want it or style the background to have a gradient of blues, is very much like drawing a picture, and I love it.
Do I get frustrated sometimes when things are going as I wanted. Of course. I threaten to through my computer out the window on a regular basis….it usually starts listening after that. Joking it doesn’t, but stepping away does help. Will JavaScript ever be easy for me? Anything can happen. So for now I will struggle when I need to do something different with a page and I will enjoy the results when it finally works.