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General Discussion

Posted by Mohamed Mokhtar
Mohamed Mokhtar
9,651 Points

Development practise

Hello , i've been on the amazing Treehouse almost 2 months now . i enrolled in the front-end web development track which im having much fun in , when following along with video examples i do good but the thing is i want to practise more off Treehouse content and to be honest i hate design im only fan of development, so everytime i try to practise alit bit of coding i get stucked because i don't have a layout imagination to build my code practise on , so i would like a guide path how to practise coding if you hate design :)

3 Answers

Adam N
Adam N
70,280 Points
Adam N
Adam N
70,280 Points

You could build replicas of sites that already exist. Just make sure not to look at the source code of the sites you're remaking!

Guy Noda-Bailey
Guy Noda-Bailey
18,837 Points
Guy Noda-Bailey
Guy Noda-Bailey
18,837 Points

A super simple example of this would be the workspaces that accompany each module on Treehouse.

The design is already perfect(treehouse designers are genius), so you could play with the code behind them to add your own functionality.

Guy Noda-Bailey
Guy Noda-Bailey
18,837 Points
Guy Noda-Bailey
Guy Noda-Bailey
18,837 Points

I can spend hours fiddling with the CSS on a project, getting more and more frustrated while ending up with something that looks terrible. I am color-blind and I think I might also be aesthetic-blind aswell.

What I have ended up doing for my javascript experiments is just give each element a simple black border so I can work out the layout, and test out the functionality of the code, ignoring the fact that it isn't pretty.

As an example, the jQuery basics track has a module called create a simple drawing app; http://teamtreehouse.com/library/jquery-basics/creating-a-simple-drawing-application/preparation

This inspired me to try and figure out the code behind making a color picking app where you create a color with Red, Green and Blue sliders and it gives you the CSS values in hex and RGB formats.

I spent two hours designing the layout and colors for the app before realising that my main goal was to figure out the Javascript behind it. So I gave up on the design and started problem solving in Javascript instead.

Here is my workspace for it; http://teamtreehouse.com/workspaces/621132

If you check out the preview of it you can see that it is pretty ugly.... but my goal was to learn how to parse CSS color values and convert them into HEX values and or RGB values.

So it doesn't look very good but I learn't what I wanted to learn from it.

PS, I still want to learn CSS though. I'm going to do some more of Guil's courses as soon as I finish the ruby on rails track.

Mohamed Mokhtar
Mohamed Mokhtar
9,651 Points
Mohamed Mokhtar
Mohamed Mokhtar
9,651 Points

thanks guys you gave me few ideas :)