Session 01

The holiday season has been flying by. It's been packed with a mix of fun, work, and personal growth. I've enjoyed spending days at the beach, eating good food, hanging out with friends, and catching up on some much-needed rest. It's been the perfect calm before the storm of heading back to the mountain. However, it's not all been about fun and games. I've also been incredibly busy with my responsibilities as the Vice Chairperson of the Women in Computer Science Society at UCT. We're working on some huge events for the year, and it feels pretty cute to be in my little corporate moment, managing tasks and coordinating with team members. It's been rewarding, and I'm excited for what's to come. On a personal note, I've been focusing on building healthier habits. I've taken up running and exercising more regularly, and it's been great. Spending quality time with my family has also been a highlight. These moments make everything worthwhile.

The Technical Side

Now, onto the "technical" stuff! After some intense research (4 YouTube videos), I've decided to add more structure to my technical training. My goal is to become a full-stack developer, and I'm starting with my HTML and CSS skills. I recently worked on a website project called Cookie Mania. It was a hands-on way to learn HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. To improve my Git skills, I created separate branches to merge with the main branch and pushed to the origin, etc. I made mistakes along the way, and it took some time to understand the processes and what I'm capable of doing. I was merging unchanged branches and losing work, but with time, I got the hang of it. I went through a tutorial, trying to absorb as much as possible. But when I thought I was done, I noticed that the page's hero landing section didn't seem responsive at all. I stared at the code for nearly five days, with no commits on GitHub, just pulling previous versions and trying to figure it out. The issue had me stumped for days. I couldn't understand why my site wasn't responsive despite working perfectly earlier. I decided to go through all the code from beginning to end, commenting out and debugging each HTML and CSS element. After all that, I discovered the problem: my Chrome browser was set to 200% zoom. I was obviously irritated but quite relieved that it was sorted. The code for Cookie Mania is available on my Github here, so feel free to check it out and provide any feedback! Additionally, I've been participating in a few hackathons, which have been incredible opportunities to apply what I've learned and collaborate with others. Despite the challenges, it's been a valuable learning experience. Each mistake and every bit of confusion has taught me something new.