Electronic Mail ▪Code is not only HTML, CSS & JS.
> Code is not only HTML, CSS & JS
Finished a couple of courses @CMDAmsterdam. Very proud of my first-year students who, with no prior coding experience, create beautiful semantic and well-designed websites after 6 weeks of learning HTML & CSS.
Teaching students how to make websites, who have never written a line of code, is always a wake-up call (for me as a more experienced developer) that there is so much ‘meta-stuff’ you also need to learn.
Learning to code is not only learning HTML & CSS. It’s about learning different file formats, folder structure, file paths, large file sizes, different screen sizes, different browsers, indenting your code, validators, and many more implicit things.
These weeks I’m getting ready for a new semester. I’m coordinating a couple of courses in our second year called ‘Blok Tech’. If you’re interested you can check out the syllabus and curriculum if you want; they are publicly available on GitHub.
Project
Made a little privacy-friendly URL shortener that relies on Netlify Redirects. I only have to edit the _redirects file with URL paths, commit the changes, and done!
Usually, shorteners for custom domains are expensive and track a ton of user data. I wanted a simple way to shorten my URL’s (e.g. use in video descriptions or slide decks) but didn’t want all the stats and tracking.
Links
- Hidde wrote how he turned his Goodreads data into a self-hosted book tracker with Eleventy. I’ve been thinking about also making a whole separate website to track what Media I consume.
- A rant about writing on the web, newsletters, and the fact that RSS is only for nerds by Robin Rendle.
- Hilariously funny (as always) video by Heydon Pickering explaining Progressive Enhancement. You should also watch, his video on ARIA.
More to click
Learning
Was doing some research for beginner coding tutorials that are fun to watch but also cover topics related to web technology I find important (a11y, progressive enhancement). After some searching came across Learn From Steph which covers going from zero to website launch in a couple of videos. It’s by Stephanie Eckles who makes awesome websites and launches fun little side projects very often. You should follow her on Twitter.
Media diet
↪ Playing: Started playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It’s about 60 hours of play through time so don’t expect a ton of updates on this one in the near future. It will take some time for me to finish it!
↪ Reading: Started reading Humankind (or de meeste mensen deugen in Dutch) by Rutger Bregman. It took me a couple of weeks to finish but I’m on the last few pages.
↪ Watching: Also watched the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale about a dystopian future with theocratic dictatorship based on the book of the same title by Margaret Atwood.
That’s the end of this new(s)letter. See you next time! 👋