'Madison Tries' is a new series with Atlanta Inno, where founding staff writer Madison Hogan tries out a new tech experience and tells you her findings. Have a suggestion for what Madison tries next? Email her at mhogan@americaninno.com
With a growing need for web developers and the rise of coding schools, it seems that just about everybody---from the college student to your grandmother---is learning to code.
Believe it or not, despite writing about tech for more than seven months now, I've never really learned how to code. My experience ranges from messing with the HTML on my Tumblr blog in high school to changing the background and inserting music widgets without having to pay for a template.
For this latest adventure of "Madison Tries," I joined The Flatiron School's Build a Website in 2 Hours: Free Intro to Front End Workshop, taught by the school's co-founder and dean Avi Flombaum. The Flatiron School is the latest coding school to join Atlanta's tech scene after launching in August and is situated in the WeWork Colony Square.
The task at hand was to code a line of emojis on a webpage that would all fall down the page on a loop. Flombaum dubbed it eloquently: emoji rain.
With a fun task at hand, Flombaum was able to cover the basics of HTML and CSS during the front end workshop. During the lesson, I was able to change my background color, url and place my emojis on the page. I even learned this cool trick that explains a lot of fake news tweets. (See the fake tweet below, for example.)
But in addition to learning to type what commands where, here are the major lessons I learned during my first coding class:
- The difference between HTML and Javascript - Prior to my visit to The Flatiron School, I couldn't tell you the difference between HTML and Javascript. Flombaum put it in perspective for me: HTML is the standard code that tells a webpage what to display and where it put it, while Javascript makes elements interactive and dynamic. If you were old enough to remember the static webpages from the 90s, that's pure HTML. Javascript helps you design popup messages, reactive actions to your mouse and changing interfaces that you see on websites today.
- "Computers are stupid" - Sure, we like to herald computers as these all-knowing machines, but just as Flombaum said during my coding class, computers can actually be very stupid. When coding, if you don't give a computer the exact commands and wording it needs, it won't work. It's not like Google where if you misspell a search, it ask "Did you mean..." Computers aren't able to connect a lot of dots through inference and context like we humans can.
- Anyone can become an expert...eventually - If you've ever heard about a Malcom Gladwell theory, it was probably the one that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to become a master at your field. Though the idea that it takes 10,000 hours is up for debate, there's a general consensus that unless you're a coding savant, it's going to take you a lot of practice to pick up the skill. Even Flombaum said that he's only as good as he is at coding because he started when he was a kid, messing around on computers while his mother worked.
