Tag / web development

by Nathan Coumbe

“Googling” is an underrated skill

If you spend any time coding, you’ll quickly discover that you don’t know, can’t remember, or never learned something you need to make your project work. 

Enter Google (or whatever search engine you prefer*). 

All you have to do is type in a few words related to the problem you’re trying to solve and voila! You’ve got your solution. 

Seth Godin says in his great talk, “Stop Stealing Dreams,” that there’s no longer any need to memorize stuff. And this is exactly why—if you need something, you can just look it up.

I would agree with him, but I’d also take that idea a step farther.

As you look things up and implement them in your projects (and not just coding projects either), they will eventually become muscle memory.

The important thing is implementation—put what you look up to use immediately so that it slowly becomes a part of your vocabulary. 

I think there are two points to this post:

  1. Learn how to get good at looking up the answers to your problems rather than staying stuck
  2. Memorizing things for the sake of memorizing is pointless—but memorization will come naturally as you IMPLEMENT what you look up

*Instead of using Google, I’d highly recommend you check out Ecosia as your new search engine. Here’s why:

  • Your search results are THE SAME as what you’d get on Google
  • Your information isn’t constantly sold to the highest bidder
  • You aren’t inundated with useless ads from the highest bidder instead of quality search results
  • Using Ecosia makes your searches CARBON NEGATIVE
  • For every 45 searches you make, Ecosia plants a new tree in a place where it’s needed (that’s every 11 days for the average person)

While you’re developing your “Googling” skills, consider switching to Ecosia today.

by Nathan Coumbe

Build your way forward

Imagine a web designer sitting at her desk.

There’s this nasty problem plaguing her current project. For the life of her, she can’t figure it out…

What does she do? She sits and thinks and thinks and thinks until she comes up with a solution.

Right?

Wrong!

She’s a designer—she builds her way forward. 

She writes a line of code and runs it. Does that fix the problem? No. Did she fail? NO! She just learned something about her code. 

So she writes another line and tries again. She builds her way past the problem one line of code at a time. 

Maybe we should approach more of our problems like designers. 

Instead of trying to think our way forward, we build.

by Nathan Coumbe

Discovering a new passion!

I always believed that I was creative in only one realm, that realm being music. I have since discovered that I was wrong. Who would have thought that a musician and amateur historian would fall in love with computer programming and web development?

I began working for a very large tech company in 2017 which required learning countless new skills. One of those many skills was learning the basics of computer coding so that I might teach others in a rudimentary fashion. I quickly discovered that I had a knack for solving problems and puzzles with these languages. Not only was I good at it, I was enjoying it! It was the first thing since my days of practicing music for hours on end that caused me to lose track of time while I worked.

After a while, I decided to explore this area further and see what coding could do in the real world. I came across Codecademy.com thanks to my wife, Theresa; she is a brilliant mathematician and wonderful teacher who has had to learn coding for her master’s degree. I worked through the Code Foundations plan, then picked up the Web development plan. The results are below:

My first little webpage! A HUGE thanks to all of the people working at Codecademy.com for their awesome instructional materials, of which this was a part!

There isn’t much to it, I know, but I am thrilled! I haven’t felt this excited in a long time; I built, from scratch, a simple arts & crafts website today! Using nothing but a “spec sheet” given to me by Codecademy.com, which told me what the desired appearance of the page was to be, and one quick Google search for the answer to a question, I went to work. I programmed my own HTML and CSS code into my new text editor from Atom, linked the files together, inserted pictures, and built a simple, attractive little home page within an hour. I never dreamed I would be doing this, and yet here I am. This has been scratching my creative itch like I never thought possible. 

What begins as a collection of symbols, words, and at times what appear to be indecipherable hieroglyphics comes together in a web browser to show the reader the pictures you see above. It is simply miraculous! Creating physical art by hand is not something at which I have ever been skilled, but by using my newfound computer skills, I think I will be making my own type of art.

I am not finished learning; my skills are still in their infancy, and there are coding languages which I have not yet touched. But the fire which I thought only responded to music has again been lit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more work to do!