Not All Who Wander Are Lost

A lot of things have changed for me these last few years, both personally and professionally, and amidst that change is a consistent feeling that there is more to do and learn. Working at the same company for 10 years can cause you to settle into a well-worn, comfortable groove. Go to work, put in your time, come home, spend a few hours with your friends and family, work a bit more, go to sleep, repeat. It becomes easy to do what is necessary and expedient, but not what is meaningful.

My amazing wife has pushed me for years to pursue what I am passionate about— web design, programming, emergent technologies, and all of the things that make this period of time so exciting to live through. We’ve seen the birth of the internet, the ubiquity of smartphones, the first synaptic sparks of AI, CRISPR (a Pandora’s Box or panacea depending on your perspective), and countless other advances in science and medicine. With all of that going on around us, I had to ask myself; do I really want to work in an office doing clerical work until I keel over at my desk?

With that question lingering in the back of my mind and my wife gently nudging me along (or not so gently if I complained about my job too much), I decided to look into coding bootcamps. One that seemed to be universally loved by its students was Austin Coding Academy, a local school that offered an in-person full-stack web development course that worked around those with busy schedules. And, well…here we are.

On to the questions:

What excites or interests you about coding?

What is possible. From basic HTML to machine learning, virtually anything is possible with code. I’ve seen it firsthand at my current company, where our IT/coding team could walk around with superhero capes on and it wouldn’t seem pretentious (or insane).

What does doctype do at the top of your code?

The DOCTYPE preamble tells the browser what version HTML you are using. It refers to a Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD specifies the rules for the markup language to ensure the content is rendered correctly.

Explain how a browser determines what elements match a CSS selector.

Browsers read selectors from rightmost (key selector) to left. Browsers filter out elements according to the Document Object Model (DOM) and traverse up its parent elements to determine matches. This is important in designing efficient CSS.

What’s the difference between element and tag?

Tags denote the opening and closing of an entity, such as <p>and </p>, while elements encompass the opening tag, closing tag, and content, e.g. <p> This is the content</p>.

What do you think the “Cascade” is? How do you explain it?

Cascade is the set of rules dictating the order in which elements are modified when using selectors. The easiest way to describe would be as a set of steps, or elements, with a waterfall (or slinky) “cascading” down them, and the order in which it hits the stairs/elements is the order in which they are modified, with each step superseding everything behind it.

Explain the 3 ways to use CSS to style an html file.

How would you explain the way CSS works out loud to someone?

How do you choose the correct CSS selector.

It depends on what you need to do. ID’s can only be used once, classes can be used multiple times, attributes select specific elements with certain characteristics, types are more global, and pseudo-classes add effects and modify base classes, like :hover.

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