Meetups

We've been talking a lot about meetups this week. There was an assignment in my PHP class to research web development meetups, we had a guest speaker, a recruiter from Amazon, encourage us to attend meetups, and I asked the folks at Foundry Interactive what they thought of meetups. It seems like a good way to get involved and network. I want to research it a bit more and find a good one at a location that I can bus to. I'd also ideally like to find one that meets regularly rather than sporadically so that I can make an ongoing connection over time more quickly.

Guinan's Galactic Bar & Grill

I completed the diner assignment we've been working on in class for weeks now. Mine is called, Guinan's Galactic Bar and Grill. It took awhile to complete because I didn't want to overwrite all my customizations with Sarah's new fixed code, so instead, I compared each of her files to mine and made only the changes I needed to. It still didn't look great after that, so I spent a bit longer tweaking the CSS so that things flowed well on each page.

The page is fairly hideous despite my changes, partially because I wanted it to be purple, like Guinan's typical outfit, partially because I chose an awful spacey font for headings, and partially because we had to load the page with silly videos, maps, forms, and images. I tweaked the colors this morning and it looks a little better. However it looks, it's fully responsive! That was the main goal.

Forms

This week we're working with forms in two of my classes. The PHP is a little more complicated than other things we've done, but I think I'm still understanding it well enough. We're using some borrowed code, so understanding it takes more time than when you make it yourself.

reCAPTCHA is awesome. I'm blown away by what a good idea it is! reCAPTCHA works by using text that was hard for computers to read while scanning old books and crowdsourcing the problem while simultaneously making sure people and not bots are submitting real data. So cool!

Meetings

I've been having good meetings with my client, Bri, for her website redesign. We've met twice for interview questions, once for followup to ACTUALLY start taking over the website, and a meeting later this week to meet her web developer in a Google Hangout. I'm looking forward to this work, even though I know nothing about Joomla.

I enjoyed writing up multiple user personas in great detail. It's like the pre-writing for a play.

Responsive Design with CSS

We made our first responsive design using only CSS today [sic] in class! Pretty cool. Check it out:

Michael's Diner

It's based on this great, simple, clean template from Nick La.

Lynda Videos

Yesterday, I watched a bunch of Lynda videos. I spent about 1.5 hours on videos and questions for WEB110 where I learned all about CSS and HTML. I knew a lot of the HTML tags already, but it was good review. I'm really excited to use CSS. From the videos I learned a new font word: leading, meaning the space between lines of text.

I also spent about 1.5 hours on videos and questions for ITC240. We're really getting into the good stuff for PHP, and the code syntax is starting to blur with my Java class. I'm pleasantly surprised how powerful it seems.