Being older than most students I feel is an advantage because I have been able to see just how things have changed over the years and how much better we have it today. I can distinctly remember trying to build a simple website many years ago how difficult it was using a bunch of tables to make everything line up… and then trying to style everything by changing attributes in tags all over the page since CSS was around but nowhere near as widely used as now. It’s so great to see how innovative people have been in creating new tools that allow you to implement the vision and design in your head into something without banging your head on your desk. The first week of re-learning HTML basics and CSS brought back memories of frustration, and moving on to using an actual framework like Semantic-UI I was envisioning more of the same but boy was I wrong.
It’s very evident that people have spent countless hours building frameworks that make programming easier and faster. Semantic-UI is a great example of this, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to use it and learn more about creating a good looking website. While it was a little bit daunting at first to basically learn a whole new language, Semantic-UI does it bests to be just that - semantic. After constant tabbing back and forth from the editor to the documentation, you start to understand all of the options available to you and implement them with ease. Want a big black button? Ok just make a button tag and tell it to be a big black button! class="ui big black button" and give it the text you want, that easy. Of course there is much more you can do, and the team behind the framework has done a great job in giving you so many options to build great looking and functional websites in much, much less time that would take if writing out the HTML and CSS yourself.
I found that copying an existing website is a great way to not just learn HTML and CSS but to learn how to leverage a framework. It is like trying to copy a Lego set, but you don’t have the instructions, some of the pieces are mixed up, and your pretty sure your little brother ate a couple pieces too. You do your best to copy it, but you make modifications, understand some of the build logic, and ultimately come up with a solution that is your own and hopefully learning something along the way. The frameworks are full of useful tools, but its up to you to decide how you use them. It almost doesn’t even matter which ones you use, underneath it’s all the same, you just get to put down what’s in your head with ease rather than fight the underlying principles. It’s a wonderful layer of abstraction.
Moving on to new frameworks and what is next is exciting to me. While Semantic-UI is great and used by a large number of websites, it is also “old.” I say that because the technology world moves at such a rapid pace that people are always innovating and pushing the next level. React is a hugely popular framework that is constantly and continually evolving, and I am looking forward to getting to learn all about it and leverage what it can do. A true test in this world is when you keep hearing about the same thing, and with Facebook backing React and the number of jobs mentioning it you sure get the feeling its going to be around for a while.