Day 5: Didn't Take The Test

After breakfast I sat down in my room, setting aside the next 4.5 hours to complete my first test. In school we'd get evaluated through letter grades each term that culminated in overall GPA's but in Coding Dojo it is replaced with a "belt system". I believe there are four, maybe five, belts that students can achieve based on tests given every Friday. If a student fails they can retake the test for a certain number of times and since there are only four or five tests given in the span of fourteen weeks there are plenty of opportunities for retakes. The first test is for the Yellow Belt and it measures a student's knowledge of HTML and CSS, the very basics of web development.

Unfortunately when I tried to log into the exam page it didn't recognize me. I emailed the instructor and while I waited I decided to continue the assignment I started last night.

 I got to say that even though this assignment was the same as the previous one the parameters complicated the setup. I was already used to using divs frequently, even in sections that used only one set of tags, that I had a hard time letting go of that. I also had a hard time identifying the type of font that was used. All my life the default font style I'd type with had been Times New Roman, always figuring that all the other styles were useless. Two years ago I took a web design course where we spent a week covering typography and the historical evolution of font styles. There are families of fonts that follow certain patterns and depending on the length, width, and formatting of a piece of the text it is labeled one style or another. It was all confusing and needless to say I failed that quiz. I didn't think too much of that until now as I was trying to identify the correct font that the same webpage was using and how I could code it into my webpage. In the end I winged it and choose something that looked identical to the same site's font and stuck to it.

Inspect element played a huge role in identifying errors and finding the best way to marginalize and pad my tags so they would fit where they should fit. It's not to say that everything was perfect. Some alignment errors couldn't be explained and with no classmates around today to help me out I was forced to let some mistakes go. But compared to the last few days by the time I finished this and ran it through the validator I had less errors than all the other ones.

My goal was to make this:

And in the end I got this: 

The instructor reached back to me and manually let me into the site but by the time he did that it was late afternoon and I was spent from focusing on this assignment and so I decided to take it next week. Overall today has been my least productive day of the week. It was made worse by studying at home. I realized years ago that studying at home was the worst means of studying since distractions are everywhere and tempting. I'm always reminding myself to avoid studying at home at all cost but some days like today I arrogantly believe I can muster up enough discipline to sit at home and take care of my tasks without distractions. I could have finished this assignment hours earlier and still had time and energy to take the test if I didn't coop myself in here today. A trip to the library would have been much better. 

That's what I'm going to do tomorrow. Now that the CSS lessons are complete I should move on to the optional assignments for the week.