Finished my first week!

I’m lying on the bed of the room I’m staying in, watching cheesy TV. It was been a long and tiring week, and I’m about to start another. It was a lot of fun, and really exciting, but draining (mostly because I averaged about 12 miles of biking every day). It's hard being so far from home. The weather here is great, and it is beautiful, and I have great hosts, but I hadn't realized how much I had settled into DC over the past few years. Also, I cannot seem to understand the CalTrain system--I keep missing my trains, which is partly responsible for all the biking.

There is a lot to learn but I’m surprised by how quickly I've been able to pick up new skills in this environment. This week we covered HTML and CSS. My remote mentor said that my code looked like I was more experienced, and I think my ego inflated a little too much. There was still some humbling to come, but I've felt good about my pace through the work so far. We learned how to deconstruct sites into HTML and CSS just from a screenshot. It was a lot of fun to get to obsess over little details. The best advice they gave us (that I didn't fully use until the last assignment) was to "work from the outside in" which basically means layout your page first in HTML and CSS then fill in the details. Also, use Web Inspector or Firebug (depending on your browser)--it really is amazing!

After all that work, we learned how to use Twitter Bootstrap to do very easy front-end work. I was able to create this:

I got excited and did extra work on the assignment to make more pages. Next week, we’re going to learn JQuery and Javascript so we can actually make our buttons and pages do things. I can’t wait! 

However, I need this day of rest. Time to find out who Des will choose on the Bachelorette, and why she keeps crying in the promos...