Quick breather with responsive design

I just completed Jen Kramer's "CSS Grids and Flexbox for Responsive Web Design" on Frontend Masters, and it was fantastic. Jen is an incredible instructor who was very articulate with all of the details and did an excellent job of walking us through the 3 different stages that responsive web design has had in the last 15 or so years. Starting with floats, which she didn't spend much time on, then moving to flexbox, which still perplexes me, and finally finishing up with CSS grids was a great way to show the transformation of responsive design and how it's become much simpler to use of the years. As the need for responsive web design has grown exponentially and will continue to do so, the CSS has become much easier to use and read. Most developers who have been coding for many years have been using floats for a long time, and I think they would be able to appreciate this transformation a lot more than I do. For me, I have been learning and using flexbox and grids since the beginning of my journey, but this definitely affirms how much better they are than the early alternatives.

The class itself was set up in a way that really encouraged positive reinforcement of the concepts being laid out. These concepts were explained in a video or two, just by looking at some slides and keywords while Jen explained the ideas, then we would code something simple together, most of the time. Finally, she would set us out on our own to come up with solutions for fairly simple exercises, with some being more complex than others. This was a great way to solidify the concepts before adding on to these concepts and making them a little more complicated. I can say, after finishing all of the content, I feel really good about this material and that I could implement it on my own fairly easily. CSS grids made the most sense to me, while I may need a little more work with flexbox. Grids just seem to be the most intuitive way to think about page layout, in general.

I have a real marathon ahead of me that is likely to break my spirit, completely. My next course in the Frontend Masters curriculum is by Bianca Gandolfo and is called "JavaScript: From Fundamentals to Functional JS." It's 8 hours long and will probably take me about 3 or 4 days to complete, depending on the structure of the course itself. If it is laden with exercises like Jen's course, it could take much longer than that, but I'm okay with that. Sometimes, my tendency is to complete a course as fast as possible so I can check that box off and get that hit of serotonin from the satisfaction of completion. This is a dangerous mind frame and one I'm trying to avoid in the future. The most important thing about these courses is to walk away from them with the most knowledge gained possible. If that means it takes twice as long but I learn twice as much, I should feel much better about my time spent on this topic. I really need to embrace this new mind frame with JavaScript, as that is my biggest weakness so far and the main thing holding me back from accelerating my path to becoming the best developer I can be.

Until tomorrow!