I had my first introduction to coding from a mentor who encouraged me to become comfortable with basic coding tasks. His prompting and my desire to learn new things eventually lead me to General Assembly’s Coding for Beginners: HTML and CSS class. It was exactly what I was looking for, a class geared towards people who have minimal previous coding knowledge, but have a willingness to try something new.

About the Class

The three-hour workshop was held at WeWork, a shared working platform, in South Lake Union. There were about 20 people in the class and I was encouraged that close to half were female. Students came from various backgrounds, but commonly were there to increase their skill set and learn something new.

K2 Sport’s Front End Developer, Judah Stevenson, was our instructor. Being an avid skier, I instantly recognized the the Seattle-based company. Judah effectively walked us through the basics of coding. Having an industry professional lead made the material relevant and relatable.

During the class, we gained a general understanding of coding by covering these points:

How HTML and CSS Work Together

I learn that HTML stood for hypertext markup language and that CSS stood for cascading style sheet. The class taught me that they work together, HTML providing the structure, and CSS providing the style/layout. Having these basic terms explained made much more intuitive sense than just seeing random acronyms.

How to Inspect Websites

Each webpage is so complex, but can also be altered for users preferences. We were taught how to inspect websites by using the inspect element feature. It is so interesting to now see the method behind the websites I am on every day.

Creating a Basic Web Page

I am quite proud of my web page that you can check out below. Judah walked us through the steps of creating one from scratch, first introducing text editors and ultimately how to insert photos. By creating my own page, I felt that I learned and accomplished something new in only a few hours.

 

Our Homework

We were provided with tools that we can keep practicing with on our own, like Dash (a coding tutorial provided by GA). Judah also included inspirational articles about why it is never to late to start coding and offered his support to us all as we embark on our coding journeys. This blog reminded me we all need to start somewhere, Ed Rex writes ,

Every coder out there has to start from square one at some point. But you’re not really starting from square one. Because really, deep down, you already know how to do it. Code is instructions. You write the instructions, and the computer follows them.

I left feeling like I had the tools to continue learning about coding and with a deep respect for developers who work to be stewards of coding language.