Resources Everywhere!

Ah yes, I'm on a term break from school! What have I been up to? Learning everything I can about programming and programmer culture. There is so much information out there it is never ending. I find that exciting! I'm a researcher at my core. I love solving problems and using tools. Once I have built a base of understanding, these information streams, like Stack Overflow, will continue to provide me with cutting edge understanding of development tools and techniques.

How am I building my base knowledge? MIT OpenCourseWare videos have been really interesting and with 3,875 videos there is a lot of material to take in. I use Codecademy to learn the basics of programming languages and then switch to videos to expand my knowledge. So far, Quentin Watt Tutorials and Caleb the Video Maker have been mainstays, but I have been using several others regularly as well.

Anyway, back to learning! Until next time....

Every journey begins with a single step

I am currently on a term break at Western Governor's University. During this time I have no access to the WGU resources but have been working very hard to prepare for the classes that I will complete next semester. Currently, my primary focus is on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript so that I can knock out a couple of classes and pursue the CIW: Advanced HTML and CSS certification quickly upon my return. I am feeling restless and am very much looking forward to getting back to school. So far, my website is coming along but I have been mostly using the code as documentation of the different syntax. For example, from my HTML code.


     <meta charset="UTF-8"/>  <!-- this is the character set. it tells browsers what to display -->

     <meta name="description" content="Todd Skibbe's Programming Projects"> <!-- this is a web             page description -->

     <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">  <!-- this tells the website to refresh every 30 seconds -      ->

     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="main.css"/>  <!-- the link element is pointing to my          css document, in this case main.css -->

     <script></script>  <!-- this is where I link to JavaScript code -->

     <base></base>  <!-- the base element points to where all of the external links are held -->

This code is very basic, but it details how I am using my first website build as a study tool. It seems that I will be building this first set of code using every tag and element that I can find and then will choose the elements that I want to incorporate into my featured projects webpage.

Welcome to my blog

I have created this blog to publicly document my road to becoming a highly skilled software developer. Coding has sparked something in me and I am excited to see where this goes.

Currently, I am working on creating a website that will showcase my projects. The website is being built using HTML5 and CSS3 and will be debuted in the near future. I plan to add additional features soon using JavaScript. After I have sufficiently built skills with these three languages I will take the CIW Advanced HTML5 and CSS3 Specialist certification exam (1D0-620).

In the near future I will create projects using: Python, MySQL and Java.