Phase 1: Life at Flatiron, Phase 1 Project

Much of life has sprung up since I started Flatiron, but my determination will see me through. Life sometimes gets in the way of our dreams, in ways we never expected. People change, and drastic changes happen in our environment more than you'd think, but a rather well-known scientist once said:

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” –Albert Einstein

So I come to the computer with knowledge in hand, a number of problems to solve, worries abundant in the back of my mind, and assignments to be done. Let us start with what I have learned at Flatiron School so far.

• JavaScript & the Three Pillars of Web Programming

Throughout the Phase, I have learned quite a bit about JavaScript. We were taught about variables, objects, arrays, and different types of functions and their uses.
JavaScript is a primarily client-side scripting language used to create webpages starting in 1995. It is extremely versatile and allows for complex features such as creating dynamically updating content, animating images, and loads more. During this Phase, I learned the basics and how the language interacts with HTML (markup language used to create webpages alongside JavaScript) and CSS (a language for styling webpages). I learned about scope (where the functions are placed and how accessible the variables/ information within a function are), arrays and array iteration, and the Three Pillars of Web Programming.

The Three Pillars of Web Programming represent how events are recognized, how the DOM (Document Object Model) is manipulated, and how a server is communicated with to exchange or change information. Alternatively, folks would say the Three Pillars are JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I would agree with that sentiment as well; we are taught how the three interact and almost exclusively create the way we interact with the internet daily.

• Phase 1 Project

Admittedly, this project has taken more time to complete than I would like. I had difficulty with the sheer number of tasks, along with already being behind a bit. However, I think I have a decent grasp on the project and after some oversight with one of my instructors, I finished it.

I thought of something fun and interactive, and I know I wanted it to include a dropdown menu. It seems a little basic, but a lot of work was put in the inner workings. First, I cannot rest until I created a Dark Mode button, which I included using HTML for the button and CSS for the methods of recreating Dark Mode. Then, I set to work on a dropdown menu that included the thirteen classes of the game Dungeons & Dragons, where you could choose a class and see what it's recommended abilities are and what features is attributed to which class.

I also wrote code to allow the display of a relevant image to the class, such as a picture of a wizard for the Wizard class. This was one of the most difficult things to accomplish, mainly due to issues with my code when switching back to the default option.

During this project, I sought to challenge myself by creating a dropdown menu, and successfully implemented it. In order to create the options for the dropdown, rather than manually filling the options, I used a "forEach" loop for each option in the "db.json" file to put the classes into the dropdown. Then, I used a change event listener to when I click on an option in the dropdown, it would populate the information onto the webpage for the user to see.

Some of the issues are still there, but for the scope of this project I would put this under a "win" and call it a day, I don't have a lot of time to use on this small bug for the project. Perhaps another time.