Accountable

 

Honestly, I wasn't sure whether to write tonight, but I felt like I had something in my head that had to come out somewhere!

I am on the way to 3000 followers on twitter, which is preposterous considering I've been on the platform for less than 2 months... People do ask me 'how', and I cover that topic in another post - How did you do that? but essentially, I still don't really know. My LinkedIn has also felt the benefit, and I am connecting and interacting with so many incredible people every day. I haven't partaken in any sort of course, nor am I part of any secret club!

I love speaking and interacting and laughing with all of you - I often talk about the importance of mental health and taking breaks - 'my DMs are open' means just that - you can message me and I will do my very best to reply. Just try to say something a little more meaningful than 'hi'!

So alongside all of the incredible interactions and laughs that we have - we also support each other all of the way. None of us are infallible, and we all need a chat from time to time. This brings me onto my main point:

I've been learning to code rapidly, and with incredible support from so many of you. Alongside that, I try and share as much information as I possibly can, because I know that others may find it useful. All of this means that as fast as the information is going in, I am simultaneously micro-blogging to you all on twitter, and taking notes from what I am learning for myself, and also trying to take notes in order to write blog posts!

I guess what I am trying to say is this:

I am here for all of you. You can DM me that you fancy a chat and I will make that happen.

Having this many followers does seem to carry some sort of strange accountability to it - I want to help all of you where I can, and the majority of you are learning to code along with me!

I wrote my first blog post a little over a month ago - it is all quite a new thing!

Learning to code is exhausting, and we all need to take a step back for a second and take in what we are doing. It's ok to feel overwhelmed sometimes.

I have people asking me how to overcome the feelings of doubt and apprehension when it comes to learning new things. 

I say just go for it. Learn the thing you are worried about.

Anthony, and many others will attest to how adamantly against learning to use git in the command line I was, but luckily my arm was twisted, and now I'm using it multiple times a day. You know what? It isn't as  scary as they* make it out to be!

So - what I learned today. Margins and padding in Bootstrap....

This stuff is pretty intuitive! I plan to go back over it tomorrow, as I'm pretty tired!

Just look for what you want on the official Bootstrap site, put it in your code, and off you go!

I struggled at first with working out where to put it all, but essentially you just put it in a class inside the thing that you want it to refer to....

This snippet of my code looks like this on the webpage: 

Here, I wanted to use bootstrap to tell my h3 element (my name and future job title) what to do. You can use CSS for this, but as I am learning bootstrap right now, it makes sense to use the built in functionality.

You see it has the same amount of spacing top and bottom? That's from mt-1 (margin top -1 and margin bottom-1) and also py-3 is for the padding ('y' is for doing the top and bottom padding at the same time)

So Bootstrap here has the same functionality as CSS can do, but it is almost pre-made - you choose from preset things/elements (?) rather than writing it all yourself.

*they - can be whoever you want it to be - your colleagues, your tech friends, your brain, etc etc. For me, it was my mind that was making it complicated