Grab a Notepad - my introduction to web development

My first exposure to web development

My first exposure to web development was in high school. Flashback to senior year when everyone was putting the finishing touches on their high school careers, and looking at the years ahead.

My sights were set on the local community college, to walk down their associate’s degree path as a web developer, and possibly a bachelor’s degree if need be.

My guidance counselor recommended that I take an intro to HTML class through the local career tech center, with the promise of college credit if I passed. I thought what the heck, sign me up!

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Learning HTML, CSS, and early struggles

They started us off with basic HTML concepts, including example code to be used in the wild. I worked through the assigned chapters, fumbling my way through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and table layouts.

My instructor was probably tired of looking at my copious line breaks in place of using actual style properties.

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Discovering JavaScript

The course work was laid out for the semester so I decided to try and work a couple weeks ahead to go for the bonus/ancillary content.

In taking a peek at the rest of the textbook, I noticed JavaScript in later chapters as it wasn’t in the syllabus.

Not knowing anything about the topic, I glossed over the first couple pages, and thought: “Huh. Looks like fun.”

My instructor explained that I was more than welcome to try and tackle these chapters, but only a select few of her students were able to escape the belly of the beast over the years.

I was able to work through the JavaScript exercises without pulling all of my hair out, despite almost running out the clock on the final assignment.

I finished the class feeling accomplished, along with a feeling of overconfidence in my JavaScript abilities (JavaScript has been the bane of my existence ever since cracking open that textbook.)

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Notepad as an IDE

In retrospect, using Notepad as a pseudo-IDE (integrated development environment) wasn’t the smartest decision, but I didn’t know any better.

This decision indeed works as a means to create and edit web pages, albeit a poor choice as it’s simply a text editor.

Notepad doesn’t have any of the fancy bells and whistles like color-coding, formatting and other features IDEs ship with that help beginners along.

Committing the tags and various properties to memory helped although it wasn’t the optimal path to take.