A Mighty Fall in the Spring
22 Feb 2018I was 18 years old when I tried to make my own website for the first time. It was for my church and was part of my high school senior project. Diving straight into this felt like a mistake, I felt ill-prepared, unwilling to learn, and unable to grow from this experience. I felt like I tried to hop on a ride that I couldn’t handle, and I probably shouldn’t have made it on in the first place.
Like all my other prior experience in software engineering, this experience was useless and wasn’t helpful at all after that project ended. The platform provided generic pre-designed templates, and only gave me freedom with content. That project was so painful, yet so forgettable and monotonous, I never wanted to build a website after that. As a college student, I’m faced with a similar journey with IntelliJ and Semantic UI. Though there is just as much pain and fear this time, there’s some enjoyable thrills that I can carry with me after this second round.
HTML and CSS gave me a bumpy start on FreeCodeCamp, but things started to smoothen out through exercise and freedom to recreate around the Web. Island Snow got me comfortable with lists and ui menus, while my Jai Wolf mockup gave me hours of experience with grid containers and got me more engaged with CSS. The conventions behind Semantic UI are more self-explanatory than raw HTML. It’s easier to type “ui centered grid container” than padding on the left and right. There are still elements of Semantic UI that I need to learn for web design, such as ui video and item. Both would’ve been useful in my jaiwolf.com mockup, which I’m excited to build upon with React and Meteor.
This emotional roller coaster has been climbing ever since we started, and now that we’ll be free falling into React and Meteor, I’m hoping that Semantic UI can be a reliable puking bag, or at least a good reference for me to get over the roughest turns. Now that we’ll be diving into React and Meteor, I’ll see if the time and frustration from Semantic UI will be worth it. Hopefully this will become an experience that can make me laugh and feel nostalgic, and not something I will look back and cry about.