It has been two weeks since my last post, and I have made more progress and am on track to creating my final website. Over the past two weeks, I have played with HTML code more and following my mentor’s advice, I made a barebones HTML website. It consists of just HTML code and is the building blocks for my website. I also started to play around with CSS code, and I learned a great deal about it.
As a reminder, CSS code is a styling tool that reorganizes and shapes your website. It is the second of three codes I need to learn to be able to make a fully functioning website. Some simpler examples of what CSS can do is change the color of the text, background, change the font, text size, text arrangement. CSS can do much more, but these are some of the more basic tools. When I first started CSS, the first thing that I learned is that there are two ways of writing CSS code: Internal and External.
Internal CSS is code that is written straight in the HTML document. Inside of the <style> < /style> brackets are where all CSS code goes. Typically, this isn’t a very orthodox way, especially when writing a full-scale website. The other way of writing it is external CSS. External is when you write your CSS code in a separate document than your HTML code, and then link it to the HTML document. External CSS code documents go by name.css. Almost always external is the way to go, and I plan to make all my future CSS documents in an external file.
By my next blog post I shall have planned out my website on Figma and have codded it all in CSS. After my next post, I’m going to start learning JavaScript, and eventually put code it into my website.
Internal:
External:
- What went particularly well during your mentoring sessions?
One thing that went quite well during my meetings with Stephan was the flow. We got into it right away; there were no delays or hiccups that could have interrupted our meeting. As usual, we went through my progress, he gave me some feedback, showed me a few websites and gave me some reconditions. One thing he told me to do before I continued styling my website using CSS was that I should use a website called Figma. Figma is a sandbox website designer. You can add images, text, lines, and edit your website. Stephan recommended that I should play around in Figma and design how I want my website to look before continuing with CSS. \
4. What logical challenges affected your communication?
4A) What factors affected your ability to interact effectively?
To answer both questions 4 & 4A, one big factor that affected our ability to interact effectively was meeting online and not in person. Meeting online is already a lot different than in person, but what it really does is obstruct our interactions. If we were in person, he could write feedback directly in my code at the exact spot and slightly edit parts of it to make it better. For now, all I can do is show him and take notes or send him the file and have him send it back with comments in the code, but that kind of defeats the point of mentors, so I refrained from doing that. Unfortunately, due to COVID, there is nothing I can do about meeting in person. By our next meeting, I plan to have figured out a solution.
What three strategies could improve the quality of your mentoring interactions?
One strategy that could improve the quality of our meetings is preparing more questions beforehand. I prepared some questions, and the rest came to me either during or after talking with Stephan. Another strategy is to send my files to him before the meeting starts. This way he can look over my work before and prepare notes for me, to improve efficiency. Another strategy I could do to improve the quality of our meetings is to ask for some type of “homework” for him to give me that would progress my knowledge and skills even more.