Punchcode Programming Bootcamp, Day 54

When someone tells you that you are good at something it tends to be the first step towards you actually becoming very good at it. Its almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Early on in the bootcamp one of my classmates remarked that I take the time to make my projects stylish and that my things turn out looking good. I really appreciated that, and ever since I've taken extra time to make sure that my projects have nice touches of style. That means having buttons that don't look like 2D rectangles sitting on a flat screen, backgrounds that are not just plain white, soft colors with complements and other things that hopefully make the user-experience more enjoyable.

So that small step forward took root today, as I took it upon myself to work on styling the entire site. Now since we were asked to work with Semantic UI there isn't too much customization we can do without losing the appeal of that library. So I can't go completely nuts with background-gradients, GIFs and other things. But there are still plenty of options and I am excited to explore them all. Because styles is my thing.

The other thing I really enjoy is making websites look good on tiny screens. There is something fun about taking a completed website and moving the pieces around Tetris-style to make a newer, compact version of the site. So it didn't take too long for me to restyle all of the pages into functional components at 300px width.

The weekend is almost here. A few of the other classmates broke off to start working on building an app in React Native. I took a look over their shoulder during my breaks and it looks really fun. And I've already heard that the backend work is tricky and its not nearly as easy as our instructors made it sound at first. Part of me wants to work on the React Native parts because it seems like a thing that a potential employer might want to see on a resume. However, I really enjoy doing what I am doing right now and I think playing into my strengths is probably going to produce the best results for this project. There are already three very talented developers working on the app so I'll do my thing and give my brain a chance to learn Semantic UI inside and out.