HTML, CSS, & Free Beer...

Week One of TIY (The Iron Yard) was a blur, and I am writing this post two weeks into the program. So I may be leaving out a few things that have slipped my mind. Here are the highlights as I remember them...

Sunday Night:

On Sunday night we all meet at at the Growler Station downtown Greenville for a meet and greet. It was where I met everyone for the first time: fellow class mates, our instructor Jake and his assistant Matt. We also got to meet two of TIY's founders, which was very cool.

They had reanted out the place, so everyone in there was affiliated with TIY and you could have all the free beer and food you wanted, they had catered the food. Which was amazing! I failed to take a picture of the spread before we dived in, but here is what the table looked like at the end...

Here we are after stuffing ourselfs (atleast I stuffed myself ;)

It was very chill, and I was a bit nerveous (like everyone I guess) at first. My nerveousness came from questioning myself about wether I had made the right choice in quiting my job and coming to TIY in pursuit of my goals. After listening to Eric and Mason (TIY co-founders) speak my nerves were calmed. I knew in that moment that I had made the right move. I sorta knew all along, but got the jitters when I standing in the Growlers Station surrounded by total strangers. In that moment the weight and reality of my choice to come here hit me like a ton of bricks. It sounds weird I know, I wish I had a better way to articulate to you how I was feeling in that moment. Here's Eric and Mason telling us thier deepest secrets:

Anyways, everyone turned out to be really cool and chill. I really enjoyed that first night.

Monday Morning & the start of Week One:

We started off with a bit of HTML and CSS, I thought that the first day was kinda easy. However I have worked with HTML & CSS in the past a tiny bit, so... There were some in the class that had never done anything with it. All in all I was feeling good about myself and figured that I would glide on through the program...

Then day two hit and we were given a bit more homework than the day before. However I was still feeling good, as again I had worked with this stuff a bit befoe. At the end of day two Jake told us that he had been taking it easy on us and just wanted to ramp up slowly. Here's Jake helping us learn CSS Positioning (or this could have been where he was talking about unicorns :)

From day 3 onwards the pace picked up s did the ammount of info being given to us, and the ammount homework assigned continued to increase. For the weekend homework we had to create a website from scratch. We were given the image you see below:

We were told to code out the HTML and CSS. It was at that point that I feel like all hell broke lose so to speak. (well, not as soon as I saw the image, but soon as I started building out the site)I quickly found that it's super easy to do smaller projects, and super easy to get badges on sites like Code School and Code Academy. (thoese sites make you feel like you are man, it's easy to keep leveling up)

However when staring at a blank screen and having to type out every line of HTML and CSS from scratch, with the goal of creating a site that was pixel perfect... well lets just say that I quickly found out how much of what were taught I retained about HTML/CSS and how much I didn't.

I spent most of the weekend combing through the documentation. The Mozilla Developer Network website and CSS-Tricks.com became my best friends that weekend. All in all as I look back the first week was amazing and I loved every moment of it.

Oh a almost forgot we had a guest speaker come in on Thursday, and talk about how to win the internet. It was none other than Mr. John Sadington, his talk was very motivating. Were it not for his talk this blog would not exsit. Here's a blurry photo of John speaking to my class:

Random sidenote:

One thing was just odd to me was all the free beer. If you were so inclined you could go grab a beer when ever you wanted. I am also a Fire Fighter & EMT so in that line of work alcohol being present at the station would mean your job (even if you weren't consuming it). Seeing people have a beer with their lunch everyday was the coolest thing to me.

tee-hehe... lol

Until next time...