• It is hard to believe that I’ve been in school for 40 days now (minus weekends and holidays). It is big! I can feel the difference and I am more sue about my skills right now. When I look back at my initial projects, even those, I was proud of, I feel little nostalgic, but they make me itchy. They are so poorly coded, no structure, no developer set up, styling and design are awful. Hehehe, I guess I own RED also that my taste changed.
• Finishing off our 5th school project - Quotes on Dev, with Wordpress REST API. This is very interesting and I already have an idea for a simple app using the feature. Hope to work on it during the weekend. But if the weather is good, I need to bike with my family. I have not been outside longer than two hours for 40 days! :D
• Do you know what master resume is? I do! We covered that on our Personal Professional Development class today. It is a hell of work, but once done, it should be easier to tailor any resume for a specific company job post. It is on my to do list. But first I need to code my to do app :D.

• It is hard to believe that second month of school is almost over. We just submitted our 4ht project - simple wordpress site. It seemed huge when it came to css styling, but I am vary glad that we did it. Right after submission we started the next project, focused on WP REST API. I won’t lie, I need to watch more tutorials to fully get it. For this project all the css can be done within one lab, yay!
• Due to RODO and other data protection stuff I am swamped with changes on my two polish blogs - I need to sign contracts with hosting company, newsletter company, create policy and inform all my visitors what I am doing with their data. Lots of paperwork, and I am still half way ready.
• I know that in Canada no one celebrate International Kids Day, but believe my, my kids will not forget. We haven’t been living in Poland for 4 years but for them 1st of June is more important than Halloween for Canadian kids. And I do not have anything special done yet (or bought)

• I am almost done with my Wordpress project and I am supper happy about it. Still needs to add some little tweaks, fix colors, but I did all the heavy lifting. I wanna try custom loops on other wordpress installation and some of the tricks shown by teachers are so awesome (like changing the default WP logo on the login page - it is brilliant move for my future clients’ customization!). I also saw that some students from previous cohort included gif files in they README, which is very clever and eye-catching. I want to do that for Inhabitent;
• I am vary tired and happy. Today I am ending the 7th week of Web Dev bootcamp and it taught me a lot! I could not even imagine learning this on my onw. In this time. I feel like I have a good starting point for future projects. Which is so nice! Maybe I will even find a job one day…

• We had Victoria Day long weekend but I stayed home and tried to apply this massive amount of css to our new project: Inhabitent Store Wordpress site. It did not look so scary at the beginning but after diving deeper and deeper I realized that, omg, there are so many classes I should use! Thanks to today’s lecture (about Information Architecture) it all started to make sense. And I can see that with this project, I can actually learn so many new css concepts, like filter or css sourcing map (awesome!).
• At school we also had a townhall about blockchain. Make sense, but I do not see our family using it for our finance and investing. Too many question marks right now. Besides, thanks to Vancouver housing market we do not have anything to invest ;)
• Back to coding: I really, really like what we are doing with Worpdress right now. I guess I am sentimental - 4 years ago, when I started blogging, all that WP stuff were terra incognita for me and I remember how frustrating I was back there, asking my husband for every single tweak in code / theme. Looking back I must thank Wordpress that kind of made me learning how to code. I did not know that this is such fun.

  Thank you, WP!

• I should have bought ticket to the Vancouver Tech fest earlier. I was not sure if I would be going and by the time I finally decide , the ticket sale finished. Hmm…
• I was also asked to explain my php code today. The Space Blog lab activity code. I did not go well, I need to leave myself more comments inside the code, because I have difficulties with explaining it to other. I guess I took the approach “the code is working, no matter how”. Well, it matters how. Otherwise I just have the feeling that I touched something, scratched something, it felt good for a moment (“yay, it is working”), but then the bigger question arrived: “good, but how it is working?”. It is so frustrating not being able to share my way of thinking. Also, too much stackoverflowing, Kate, too much.
• I do not wanna finish this day with a bitter mind, so I will write, that I am very happy - we’ve started Wordpress theming. Inhabitant site and Wordpress API, nice, sweet, omg. :) Very happy. I do not get games and pong project was not my kind of web thing.
• My family refused to help with doing grocery shoping so for the next couple of days we will be eating cereals and onions. This is what was left in the kitchen. No worries, we will not eat them together ;)

• Today we got more PHP fun. It was fun actually. I just painfully realized that that I should have spared myself “stackoverflowing” yesterday (I was looking for function that allows to loop through multidimensional array in PHP). We got the method today, and it is way easier than what I found googling. Lesson learnt ;)
• Trying to get together my knowledge and start building kind of portfolio site. The github repo for that one is under name: the-time-is-now, but it is real mess when it comes to workflow. I need to straighten the files paths and import/export dependencies. I want to use CSS Grid because I did not use it once in any projects.
• So tired that I actually felt asleep right after I got home. I took a nap with my younger son. I woke up but he still sleeps. These are the wonderful evenings when kids are sleeping…. O I know what I am gonna do - I will set up my account on WorkUp. Because, why not? :) cheers, Kate

• We have started 6 week. The townhall, aka students gathering and brainstorming was about quick prototyping the ‘something’ that helps with organizing trustworthy and transparent fundraising. It was meant to be like a short hackathon. Good cause, but it was too laud for me, therefore I could not focus and think. Maybe am just old….
• Today I wrote my first line of PHP that I actually understood. I remember when in February I was trying to tweak Wordpress default theme: twenty sixteen and all what I was doing, was googling, copying, pasting and trying to get it look like I want it to look. Not too much of understanding what I was actually doing. Writing PHP and HTML tags together is even possible? As it turned out, it is. Sweet deal :)
• As a lab we are writing simple, two pages PHP blog, without database and post data fetched from json file. I pushed mine to Github in case you wanna look at the code (very ugly code, I must say).
• Summer, thank you for your generosity. Could you chill out a little? My family went crazy due to this sudden summer take over and all my boys are sick. Additionally there is a pro d day this Friday, and I might bring Chris with me to RED, because I do not have a babysitter. In such moments I miss Warsaw so much…

• I am sorry that many times I cannot keep up with daily blogging about RED experience. Last two days (and nights) my little one get sick (Welcome to parenting fun stuff) and we start talking about Java Script as object oriented programing. This is huge! I mean, Java Script and concepts of class, objects, this, bind, etc. We needed to prepare the pong game and my whole time was eaten up by this project.
• I admit it - I do not get most of it. I do not know it. Yet. Too many “thises” in one place. That’s why I watch almost all youtube tutorials with “java scritp objects” in title.
• On Monday we will start PHP. OMG.
• The course pace is reasonable but I wish my day has like 60 more hours because we just scratching the surface of every subject. And I wanna know more, don’t you? I already make plans of how in July, once the program ends, I will go back to every slide we’ve seen and do all the labs and classes exercises. I do not feel I know anything. I guess this kind of feeling will stick around for the most of time.
• and yes, Suncouver is on its very best this month. Thank you lovely city.

• JavaScript is weird. Why Nan === Nan is not true? All that funny stuff we covered today. It was really good day. Note to myself: before this kind of class, get more sleep, Kate!
• Also, sent my first resume as an inspiring web developer / project manager. If anyone reads it, please keep your fingers crossed.

• This day came - I have totally forget to sum up what we’d learnt during classes. My brain is on vacation? What happened? No idea….
• Wednesday: Accessibility, Thursday: Web Performance, and Friday, ah Friday: Programming Interview! The challenges from programming interview were great, I wish we had more of that. And it looks like we will! Next week = JavaScript week. I am very glad, because this is not easy stuff to learn by myself. It is good to have somebody to pair up and code together. We will pong it! (create a pong game).
• Weekend is so beautiful but I cannot enjoy it knowing that in fact I do not know enough to consider myself well prepared for advance JavaScript class. I stayed inside and tried to study. Could have gone better, but, well, I tried.
• I ma helping with website built on Joomla and I got a desperate call that white screen of death appeared! Most of my weekend I was re-coding Joomla design and assets to WordPress, hoping that at least static version will be done. I do not know anything about Joomla and as for the first impression - it is not very beginner friendly.
• Week five - here I come! cheers, Kate

• Having UX guest lecture today - thank you! And I’ve heard that some of us, developers, actually like it even better than coding itself. No wonder, UX seems to have lots of interdisciplinary connections and is very people oriented. This feels good, even better than relation with the machine (but I love you, my laptop, you know that! :))
• Today’s topic: CSS Grid. Wow, really handy tool. I am trying to code a simple one-page website using the grid. Practice makes perfect. Ergo I need more practice.
• Having my resume previewed for the second time. Thank you RED, for the couch Charina, she knows the drill. It does not mean I am ready to conquer the world, but at least I am aware. And that’s something.
• And sun is back - thank you, whoever put it there!

• Project work day all day. I like finishing the Instanews Project. I am aware that there so much to correct and make better (I actually wrote down in the READEME file what needs to be corrected), but I am glad to leave it for now and move to other project. I will schedule time for polishing once the feedback from teacher comes. Done s better than prefect, right? (do not tell that to designers ;).
• I wanna work on weather app so it changes background depends on the weather. An play some music from Spotify. I need to read more about putting two APIs together.
• What’s pong game? I’ve learnt yesterday :)

• Project work day all day. Plus P-Day t school. Plus beautiful day outside.
• We get evaluation of first course project. I managed to complete it. But there was couple of very basic mistakes made: I need to re-factor the code and make it more clean.
• I looked at the course calendar and it seems that we will be having more and more project days. I seriously consider investing into good headphones so I can silent out the buzz outside. Otherwise it is really hard to focus and work efficiently. Maybe on Monday I will sneak down, to UX/UI floor and see if they have any empty room available..
• In the evening I got myself caught by thoughts that I do not know anything bout JS - I was trying t solve some JS challenges from the upcoming week labs, and I literally got stuck on every single one. Even reversing a string seemed like impossible to write. Ehh….. Luckily I still have couple of nights before next Friday.
• Polishing off the client website: I am very glad to work on this, because I learn so much. Not even about web dev itself, but about business at all. For example: how to treat web assets that needed to be uploaded from client’s online account like youtube video. These are sensitive login details and I was not sure how to approach it. Or pulling out data for setting up Instagram or FB fee on the website. And more fun is yet to come: Google analytics! I have never done them on clients websites so have no idea how to actually manage GA account that is not mine. “So what, Kate, you do not know it YET. But you will, eventually” - this is my new approach after seeing very inspiring video on our first RED PPD class.

• AAAA animation, css animation, transition, etc. Plus funny fact: go to the Font Awesome website, search for an icon by typing “girl”, and look what happens :). Then type “boy”. AAAAA, it is awesome, dear Font Awesome ;)
• Instanews up and running, there are two more working days to polish it up. I want to use some time to build more with my weather app, to practice ajax and js. ANd my card-generator app has not been finished, buuu. I should have finished it for today - today is my younger son’s birthday, and I set the date as my deadline. But I did not delivered - why? Time management failed, I guess. Well, now I need to finish it before my older son birthday (August).
• I am very tired, like really tired after today. Maciek took his birthday gift to boys and girls club and somebody stole his most valuable card! On his birthday! There was a little bit of a drama, but luckily he seems fine now. But I am so tired.

• Again, it is not working on Windows. Git Bash, shame on you! Luckily, teachers (plus my husband after class) helped and now I am using the Ubuntu terminal. Enormously green and very geeky one!
• Still mad at myself for not even trying the ITunes app. Need to catch up with so many stuff after 1,5 days without laptop, I did not even start typing. Well…
• Having my first resume review with RED career coach, Charina. Great insights, really. I would not think, there can be anything new to add when it comes to resume, but I was wrong. I got good advice about creating a master resume just as a blueprint (or JS object ;), and use it for more tailored ones. Also, because we are in NA, what really matters, are achievements. And passion. And reducing FTE (haha, got that one done!)
• Instanews project under construction: I get rid of html images and got instead a tags with background image properties. Easier to manipulate with a text on it. I like this API stuff more and more…

cheers, Kate

• This day arrived - I could not install on Windows whatever was required for development environment. Yes, I am aware that mac is a better choice. Still sticking to my windows though. Will see when it gets me ;)
• I blamed GULP for all those errors, because, well, it is good to have somebody (something?) else guilty, other than myself. I see the necessity of using GULP as JS task runner, helping in general. But installing this stuff was hell. Jim & Stu & Mandi, thanks by the way.
• Later I was trying to catch up with lab tasks from yesterday: fetching data from weather open API and Itunes. I did the simplest ever weather app, but Itues refused to cooperate (I was not even able to get the API key, wth?). Anyway, this means 2 more hours on instanews project. Or should I just catch up with some sleeping?….. very tempting….

cheers, Kate

• April 23rd - the first deadline. During the weekend, I wanted to do more on my first project: coding pixel-perfect website, Aloha Apparel, but I ended up with setting the Wordpress website for a client, a beauty salon’s owner. A real client, who “paid” me for the website by offering me a “total makeover”, aka haircut plus color ;). The site is not live yet, because, guess what, I need to design pictures for it. Yeap, I got like 50 pics from a professional photographer, none of them can I use as a website call-to-action banner. I need to photoshop even the staff pictures! So I guess I took a valuable lesson this weekend: how to work as a freelancer with other freelancers, and clients. “Make me the website”, that’s pretty much all the specification I’ve got. Gonna work with this and smile :)
• At RED, we have started our third week. Having Townhall, kind of assembly, this morning, meant starting week with really weird stories (like North Korea dictator and a big foot, and ice creams, and touching missiles [whaaaaa?!]).
• And here comes sir AJAX! I’ve heard about it for a long time, just pretending I know what’s that. Now I know. More or less. Having fun with creating simples API apps, like getting data from Github. I started writing something based on Star Wars API, just to score some extra points from my boys. My older son, Chris, once he found out, he took over the idea, and wanna build it on his own. So, Maciek, my younger son, gets the Pokemon API, I guess ;)
• Last night I’ve started with my second RED project, Instanews App, fetching data from NY Times. I wrote a jquery and js code, and it works. Still works, so probably, I gonna break it tomorrow, while adding some css. Or maybe no (fingers crossed).

very sunny day, yay! cheers, Kate

• First time we had a project day. I am not sure if this kind of learning helps me, but it does certainly help some guys from our class. It might be my English language limitations: sometimes it is really hard to explain to somebody, what my problem is. I guess, I need to work on that too.
• We also had our first PPD (Professional Personal Development) module last Thursday. I like the energy and knowledge of Charina, our facilitator. I was not, though, able to sit two hours with moving (those benches at the kitchen, oh no, they are bad and uncomfortable), so I stand up and stretched a little. Maybe I was rude… Or maybe PPD could be shorter? ;)
• Looking forward to the upcoming weekend! - I am working on client project: a website in exchange for a haircut (pretty sweat deal, don’t you think?).
• And my little to-do list can do more and more (very proud of myself on that). I will try JavaScript 30 challenge with Wes Bos and hope for some small and cute project.

cheers, Kate

• We got to add funny features, I meant jQuery stuff, to our project page. This is always fun; kinda of: I do not know, why it is not working, and I do not know, why it is working. ;) It’s really hard to belief that we spend two and a half days on JS and jQuery - I fell like sitting under a very thick blanket and not getting any noise from outside world. And this is just a warm up, guys.
• I wonder how much time, if any, is dedicated to JS on CS classes. A semester? Two? And we did absorb some knowledge in 60 hours. Superheros, that’s us!
• Speaking of superheros. There is this movie: Lego Batman Movie. My boys love it. In a trailer, Batman repeats a basic house rule to his butler, Alfred: ABR, Always Ben Recording (whatever Batman sings, I guess). So last night I dreamt about Lego Batman. And he was singing ABC, Always Be Committing (to Git, I guess).
• This is getting really weird….. link to Batman Movie Trailer [https://youtu.be/X9ZoKKQsxis?t=49]

cheers and …. always be coding, Kate

All day long jquery. And this song from Code School, is just popping in my head all day long too ;)….. write less, do more…

• I cannot decide yet, whether it is actually less typing. 200+ methods that’s a lot to remember. And all that siblings, and parents, well, let’s just say, it is bog family to take care of.
• Practicing my jquery with Red lab activity: making to-do list. My husband was patiently waiting until I finish, but… I finished and he felt asleep (ergo, it took longer, than I expected. Hehehe). My to-do is on Github (and looks bad, I know, Bootstrap it maybe some day?) [link]https://github.com/pinaska/to-do

cheers and …. always be coding, Kate

• JavaScript arrived, big stuff. Gonna work on my problem solving skills.
• It is not raining but I am feeling down anyway. Why? I think I am getting sick - some minor cold, thanks to April weather. But thats’s ok, just typing under the blanket right now. And lots of fluids.

cheers, Kate

• I was attending my first tech conference. Did not get like 90% of that, but who cares. It is not magic and I will crack it some day. Some day!
• my kids said after the 1 week: “mommy we hate your school” :( It is because I am no longer available for them in the afternoon. Plus the dinner is pretty much sandwiches. Plus house looks like mess. Plus I’ am stressed and not getting enough sleep, so I yell a lot. A lot. No wonder they hate it.
• I am on the other side enjoying it more and more. The fun part, JS is coming. Problems solving, mniam!
• I am trying to built this birthday card generator for my son (April 26th) but I do not have enough knowledge yet. The best is yet to come.
• This week I really need to finish my first client project , yay commercial one. Watching revolutionary sliders during nights, because client wants this slider. Tons of options, not enough time.

And it is raining. Again……

cheers, Kate

• and it is raining again buuuu,
• time to work with Command Line and Git. And yes, it is working on Windows :) So far, I was working with Github Client and using Git built with Atom. Command line makes more sense though (less clicking, thank you tab key). Just need to get used to this fancy look (how to customize it anyway?)

cheers, Kate

• playing with fonts, and you do not have t type all the fonts on your css stylesheet, you can simply generate font face style sheet from [Transfonter]https://transfonter.org/
• nice day, sunny
• and flexbox, THE FLEXBOX! I wish I knew about it earlier. Also mobile-first. I will wipe out my whole project page and rewrite it because reversing the css with media queries is too painful right now. Happy me, yay!
• also, my son is bringing friend over. Two hours of two 5 years old boys. Lucky me, yay yay!

cheers, Kate

• everything you should know about CSS
• I am not using Visual Code studio editor (feeling like typing goes faster in Atom, for me, for now)
• absolutely have now idea what position absolute is for
• after 2 years first time biking in rain and getting soaked totally. Question from my 5y son: why did you not drive a car?

I feel like I am missing something, like everything probably…. and yes, it is just third day. Anyway, I started coding layout for other website, a simple psd file based one. Because if I will stare for the whole day at the project 01 files I might as well get crazy right away. Plus I did not do any JS from 4 days, buuuuuu. And I am hosting playdate tomorrow, lucky mommy…

cheers, Kate

Here will be the first experience of Web Dev at Red Academy. First day is about getting to know each other, look around, getting familiar with. At the Web Dev part, we were having fun trying to figure out some problem solving concepts and apply them to creating an app, that could solve one of humanity problems… list of problems from..…

… and then my son’s school ran. I needed to run. They never call, but of course something just must happen on my first day of school.

Cheers, Kate

This is me typing and updating Hello-World post from original Jekyll repo. I have very small experience with markdown writing. Right now I have cloned my Github repo to my local computer and work on it in Atom. Will see where it takes me. Cheers, Kate