Fireworks

This responsive site used HTML Canvas with JavaScript and was based on this walkthrough.

The fireworks represent my 50 days of building and blogging 🙂

Here are my reflections…

What have I done well?

Shown up every day. Sure some sites were very simple, but all of these small steps, large steps, and on some days crawling, have helped me learn, improve, and grow so much.
Learned by building and teaching, i.e. on Closures and Twitter Bootstrap.
Had fun with APIs, JQuery Plugins, played with HTML Canvas, and even started with AngularJS.
My favorite page so far is my Pomodoro Timer. I started with this timer, improved it into a Meditation timer, and learned Bootstrap along the way. It is fairly simple, but it represents my learning and improving, reusing code, and is also exciting because I have ideas on how to improve it even more…

What would I have done differently?

I would have ditched Ruby on Rails much sooner. I think Rails is great for rapidly building CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) sites, but I think I learned much more from using plain HTML files. I really learned the fundamentals of what to put into an HTML head section, how to use HTML tags in detail, and use JavaScript without worrying about the extra steps that Rails requires.
Used more tutorials and guides for the front end sites. I think for the back end it is definitely best to decide what to build and just start building, but for the front end I think I learn more from imitating. I improved by seeing the same patterns and slight variations on the patterns. Then after having the repetition and imitation I have an idea of which previous patterns to apply to build the front end site.

This building and blogging has been tough at times, but I have definitely been able to learn, build, and share, and am eager to continue 🙂

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