I was a disappointment the first time so I decided to retake the class
Tags: webdev, beginners, webcomponents
Published: 2023-02-28 05:26:33

Something something time flies when you're having fun something something. 

About a year and a half ago I took a course at Penn State called IST 402. I did horribly. Not going to lie, I think I was confused half the time, unmotivated for 10%, and just preoccupied with other stuff for the other 40%. So I retook the course with a new number and better structure and more generalized focuses. My understanding as a whole for web dev is like "wowwwww, this is not as complicated as I thought". But still requires more effort than any other class I've taken at the diploma printing factory. 

### Platforms

And then we talked about platforms. For that particular week, I was 50% overwhelmed with other activities, 40% confused, and 10% sleep deprived. To be fair, I was shown a web component before anything else. I had also taken an art course on HTML and CSS at this point. Which as little effort as I put into it, I had become much better at it. But platforms were so confusing. After spending the past couple weeks on creating a card in Codepen, I think I had somewhat of an understanding of how JS, CSS, and HTML were all connected. When it came time to transfer it to a platform, I honestly had no idea where I was to copy over my code or how I was supposed to write methods. For reference, we were to work with Vue, React, and Angular. As a programmer, which I really am not a good one, it was not easy for me to transfer over the concepts without having to spend hours reading how each platform was formatted or looking at what my classmates did. And when I saw the examples, something didn't feel right. They seemed cloudy and inefficient compared to web component model I was use to looking at. Perhaps I would say something different if I was shown a money-driven platform first. 

### Teaching Web Components

Compared to the previous class I took on VanillaJS and web components, this one is different because of the amount of activity and interactivity that is done in class rather than being assigned large projects that are due several weeks out. That, and the people are not burnout seniors who have no interesting in learning something that they will not be using at the job that they already have. Now I am the burnout senior who wishes that they had more time because really, this stuff is fun and interesting if you have the time to put into it. Simply put, web components and VanillaJS need to be taught earlier in career. I wouldn't necessarily say that there is more handholding done in a sense, but there are more resources and quality videos than there was a year and a half ago. The more resources and solid understanding a person has of how everything works, more likely people are to transfer over to it. 

### Tooling 

When it comes to tooling, if you have an error with a build, it can be so god awful to fix. But in the end, it does make life easier. It also makes it a lot easier for open source access and deployment. As documentation and usage improves, it will become easier to implement. It's neither easy or difficult, it really depends on what needs to be implemented and whether or not you understand where everything goes and interacts. 

### Additional Readings

Finally when working through a problem or developing something read the documentation. Read Stackoverflow. Cry a little. The ModzillaDocs help. And if you're super lucky, you have a good friend that makes you an hour long video telling you how to do something, so you better watch that. And read examples on GitHub. See what other people created. 

As always, music recommendation :).
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