Code

My work sometimes organises cool events and things to do. Today was Taste of Code. An introductory one day workshop teaching basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They had one last year, which was popular, so they did one again. I signed up for it as it sounded like fun. My HTML is pretty good, my CSS is rusty as I haven’t used it in years beyond the occasional tweaking of my template here. But JavaScript is 95% new to me. So I figured I could only learn from it.

Only downside, it was in Amsterdam, and started early. With the program slated to start at 9:00, I had to leave Groningen with the 6:04 train. But there’s no train to Groningen until 6:22… So my poor Mom got chartered to drive me to the city so I could catch the train. We left here at 5:15, which meant I had to get up at 4:45 and was pretty short on sleep. Fortunately that didn’t bother me too much today.

I was nicely on time for the train so I could get some breakfast and coffee to go. No hick-ups along the way this time around, so I arrived exactly as scheduled. There I met up with one of my team mates who had also signed up. We made our way to the building and found where we had to be.

The day seemed to go pretty fast, but it was also intense in a good way. The workshop was given by some people from Codaisseur. The idea was for us to build our own functioning rssreader by the end of the day. The presenter would tell us a little bit about something, along with slides. Then we’d take the things shown, along with extra info and code samples on their github and code. They had several coaches present to help people with questions.

The first parts were easy for me as they were just the HTML base structure and the CSS to go with it. Then we got into JavaScript. We first learned some basics and made a greeting to go at the top of our page that would change depending on time of day. Having thus gotten our fingers wet, we moved on to using YQL to pull up the JSON-object based on the rss feed urls we’d chosen. And then more JavaScript and jQuery to turn that into an actual list of the most recent items in that rss feed.

This was very fun to do. I grasped what we had to do pretty quickly and have built an okay looking and basic functioning rss reader. But there’s still plenty left to learn 😀