New Year, New Lessons: Day 01 of #100DaysOfCode
Published: 2022-01-18 16:23:06

Hi there! I'm Aly. I write content for the web part-time and I'm also taking part in a web development boot camp to make the career shift I've been planning. My ultimate goal (for now) is find a job as a developer by mid-year. (Woo! Big goals!)

I have been mulling over this for almost half a year now, but truthfully, I've been putting it off out of fear. On top feeling afraid of the time commitment that I know it will entail, just putting yourself out there at all can be a bit difficult and nerve-wracking. So, while I still have a bit of this New Year Energy/confidence, I've finally decided to take the plunge and work on the 100 days of code challenge! 

**Why? 
**
Currently, I am about a third of the way through a 6-month boot camp. While I do already spend quite a bit of time every day just reviewing lessons and working on assignments, I did want to be able to work on projects outside of class to reinforce the lessons we've learned and possibly learn new lessons, beyond the curriculum we're following. I want to build a portfolio with projects done both in class and on my own. 

At the same time, I've used Python in my last job and learned Django by taking a class shortly before the boot camp started. I want to keep those skills sharp, as the boot camp's coverage is pretty different.

I also just think it's important to keep track of my progress and celebrate little wins as I go. 

**The Rules**

According to the 100daysofcode website, there are really only two rules to the challenge: 

1. Code minimum an hour every day for the next 100 days.

and

2. Tweet your progress every day with the #100DaysOfCode hashtag.

Since I am not active on Twitter, I'll be blogging about the experience instead. I don't exactly have a planned format for this yet, but to make it a bit easier on myself, I've decided to write about my progress daily and create a summary post at the end of every week.

For now, I thought I'd share my progress on the first day: 

**Day 01:**

Most days are now spent catching up on homework for class and working on our capstone projects. I'm not sure how much I can go into detail about what we learn and do in class, so for now, I won't be writing about our coursework, specifically. 

However, after working on in-class projects today, I did make some time to polish my portfolio. 

(See my portfolio here: https://agdelvalle.github.io/portfolio/)

Though I was much slower than I would've liked, I'm happy that I was finally able replace those placeholders in the "projects" section with actual links to project samples. Besides adding the most relevant content to my portfolio, just the act of looking through my existing projects was a good thing. It was a much needed inventory-taking of things I could improve or continue working on. 

I was also able to make some changes to the appearance of the page, changing up some of the colors used and moving the navbar from the left side to the top of the page and fix the responsiveness of the page as a whole. 

I'm feeling a bit shy again just writing about this, because I know these are all very simple, easy things. My portfolio itself (in its current form) is quite simple made with plain old HTML and CSS. However, I do feel good about the work I did today because it was a fun exercise in the basics. I got the opportunity to take a quick look at my body of work so far and it gave me ideas for projects to work on in the coming days. It also definitely renewed my appreciation for flexbox and how easy it was to format the layout of my page because of it. 

I'm looking forward to the coming days and to all the things I know I'll learn along the way! If you've made it this far, thank you for reading and I'd love to hear any thoughts or feedback you might have with my work at any time. 

And if you're working on the challenge yourself, I'd definitely love to follow you on your journey, as well!