I’m from a mountaineous region, so hiking has always included some elevation changes. My favorite part of a hike was always reaching certain vantage points and looking back. You’re still feeling energetic, you know there’s more mountain to hike but you put some work in, and you just can’t help but turn and look back to see how far you’ve come. And the view... The view was always “worth it”

After 6 weeks in my CTRL-SHIFT Code School Web Developper bootcamp, I feel like I’ve reached my first vantage point, and I can’t help but look back at where I’ve been.

I started out in the foothills of HTML. It felt like I was learning a secret code that I could send to anyone and the browser would “translate” it for anyone I wanted to see it (which was everyone and sort of defeated the purpose of it being “secret”) The first real struggle was trying to get an image to show up. 😂 . I went back and forth at least 10 times to see if it would “pop up” yet.

Wandering into CSS felt like I’d entered something vast and, frankly, intimidating, but other, more experienced hikers were quick to assure me that, this feeling will never go away. Although, I wasn’t sure if this was meant to reassure me, it at least told me it was ok to be here feeling like this and they showed me the tools they used to navigate the region. I started trying out colors and positioning, and even a brief moment spent with moving an animation across my screen.

The really fun part came when I figured out how to create multiple pages and run the CSS across all of them. I started to feel just a little sense like, “I’m a real developer”. So thats where I’m at. I’m sure that as I progress, I’ll look back at my first website, and smile fondly at it as one of my early steps, but for now, I get to feel just a bit proud of how far I’ve come and enjoy the view... Its worth it.