Congratulations!

If you’ve just recently graduated from Flatiron congratulations. Take some time to celebrate and prepare for your next challenge which is applying to tons of tons of jobs. While hustling to look for work, you might forget exactly what you’re fighting for. You need to keep your code sharp! You need to keep your skills intact and constantly learn new things, as well as reinforce what you’ve already learned so you don’t forget it.

Flatirons Curriculum

Luckily, you have access to your curriculum that you did over at Flatiron. You have those 5+ weeks over learning and code challenges to go back on and review. Even myself just recently re-read and did the Redux course to refresh. I’ve been so focused on Bootstrap and React Hooks I slacked off on the Redux side. However, if you’re like me you will want new challenges and new courses with different material and taught in a different way to make it feel all new again and have a new learning experience. That’s where additional courses can come in. Today I will be talking about Free Code Camp and although not in as depth as Flatiron, how it will help you keep sharp.

Certificates/Tons of Learning

The good thing about FFC (Free Code Camp) is after every 300 hours course you’ll get a certificate to show off on your social media, resume etc. They have ton’s and each is on what you’d like to do. Responsive web design and Front end libraries for Front end. Algorithms and Back end OO for back end etc. It gives you the ability to choose what courses you want to spend those hard earned 300 hours on. It’s all pretty basic material really starting from the top. However, it’s good to get those fundamentals and re-learn what you have already learned at a slower pace and really soaked it all in.

Projects

FCC also has projects that must be completed at the end of the curriculum and posted to Codepen. Codepen is a website that allow you to post live projects and have your code also shown so the viewer can see/interact with the project and view directly how it was made. For example within my Responsive Web Design course I just recently completed a Product Landing Page for an Air Fryer. https://codepen.io/a-spooky-duskull/pen/mdePwxd?editors=1100

It gives you the requirements needed in order to pass as well as a JS testing script that you can use as you code. What was fun for me in this project was using Bootstrap and making the project responsive. I personally don’t like coding Media Queries unless it’s for a very small thing that Bootstrap is being difficult with. For example in the Air Fryer Product project, my header over lapping into the navbar. It was only happening when the screen was xs roughly under 600px. Bootstrap would typically care take of this being as it’s a mobile first tool. However, struggling to figure it out I went with a very simple query.

  @media only screen and (max-width: 600px) {
    .form-box{
        margin-top: 15%;
        height: 100%;
        width: 100%;
    }

    #video{
        margin-top: 5%;
    }
  }

When the screen is 600px or less the css will be implemented. It was useful to get a bit of a taste of queries just to see how I can use them when my Bootstrap was not working correctly. It was a great addition to my learning because it was something I hadn’t got to touch on a lot in my Portoflio Projects.

Never Stop

Never stop learning. Keep practicing and you’ll get better than you can have ever imagined. I even look back at some of my old projects now and saw to myself ‘this code needs to be refactored” just looking at my old code makes me see how far I’ve come and how much I have improved in so little time. Keep at it!