Introduction
This blog isn’t about any specific old topic on the internet, but is focused on my school year journey! Being in web development and design wasn’t easy during the 2023-2024 school year. I faced many challenges, from being teased to how I write my S’s to the entire JavaScript unit. This blog will be a lot more straight to the point since there’s not much to explain.
Semester One Reflection (September through January)
I’ve said this a few times, but I was actually a transfer student this year. Unlike my classmates, this was my first year in Web and I was a lot less experienced than everyone else. Everyone knew the basics and I knew…. nothing. For most people, this isn’t such an issue because most people are normal. However, I found myself too embarrassed to ask for help and intimidated because I was pretty much the dumbest person in the room (which is dumb, I know).
I usually have a good grasp on academic subjects, so not being good at this one class really bothered me. It bothered me enough that I felt anxious often and was more focused on my being behind than catching up. I hated coding projects and was more than happy when we focused on designing and building our websites since I thought those things were more straightforward. My favorite project from the first quarter was the logo designing project which we did in Adobe Illustrator (my love). The logo was meant for our website and is actually still displayed here since I love my logo and didn’t feel like changing it.
From the second quarter, my favorite assignment was probably the Custom Typeface Creation assignment. Though making every single character (including accents) was a little tedious, it was something I felt I was good at especially since we were still using Illustrator (LOML) and I thought the app we used to make our Typeface was so interesting and simple to use (FontForge). I would love to do this project again as I think it might genuinely be my favorite out of all of them.
Semester Two Reflection (January through June)
Semester two wasn’t that bad for me overall. I got a lot more confident in the class and the anxiousness just ended up being dread on my bad days. That still sounds bad, I know, but it actually wasn’t! I didn’t really dread the class itself, just specific projects I found aggravating or confusing.
When I think of aggravating or confusing projects, my mind immediately goes to the Animated Logo project. As much as I’d love to only talk about projects I liked, I need to express my grievances. My dear teacher, Mr. Choate, created a few logos for us to animate. My issue was not the logos themselves, but the steps needed to get the logos into Adobe After Effects. Unfortunately, my beloved Illustrator betrayed me, confusing me when I needed to get the assets into After Effects. No matter how many videos or how many times I asked my classmates for help, I felt like I was doing it wrong. At some point, After Effects wouldn’t stop glitching, and SOMEHOW my classmates managed to get better at a design project than me. I was so insulted and so upset that I ended up just doing the noble thing and doing what one would call, “taking the zero”.
Fortunately, not all my quarter-three projects were like that. Only a few weeks before that cursed project, I had the pleasure of learning the beautiful coding language, Pea Ache Pea (PHP). When I say that I have never enjoyed coding more, I mean it. PHP was so simple and easy to work with that I nearly cried tears of joy when it actually worked for me. The PHP project we did in quarter three was the MYSQL PHP voting project. We had to code to a database which is simpler than you might think. I even had the pleasure of making my project Batman-themed. One tip of advice I will give you, dear reader, is that making your school projects inspired by your current interest is the way to go. Not only did this make the rougher parts of the project more bearable, it made me more excited to work on PHP.
I won’t talk much about quarter-four since I should really wrap up this blog post. We did fewer projects this quarter since we had to focus on our final project (which I won’t talk about in this blog since I have very mixed feelings). Quarter four was more presentation-oriented which automatically made it annoying, so naturally, my favorite project was the one coding project we had. An HTML Registration Form in which we had to use Google reCaptcha to confirm that whoever was using the form was a real person. Since it was just basic HTML with a tiny bit of new code, it was easy and simple and NOT A PRESENTATION.
Overall reflection?
All in all, I like Web Development and I like Web Design. Though I started out rough, I’m more confident now and I think I did a decent job of actually learning everything. I could’ve definitely done better but at least I didn’t do worse.
