Hi!

It's been a while since I've posted. It's been a while since I've coded too (not exactly) - I'll explain.

School

So in September 2017, I enrolled in the Bachelors of Software Engineering program at Bahria University Karachi. Which means that I can not really take a break from code - I have 18+ hours of classes per week mostly about code (in one form or another).

Work

In September of 2017, I also started my a Digital Agency by the name of ALAF Digital, and among other things, we built apps and websites, and since I'm the only developer at the agency, I write a lot of code there too. In fact, I just finished edits on a clients site and put it on upload before I started writing this.

At this point, you can see no sign of a break from code, right? Well, it's a bit difficult to explain but to me, this necessary work isn't really working on code. Well yes technically I am writing code but I'm not learning anything so it doesn't mean anything to me. To me, being active in this field is learning and discovering new things - like I was back when I just started.

Now, I may be writing code every day, but I'm just not feeling it.

I've decided to change that this year - I'm going to go back to learning new things. I may be able to build websites and apps and make some money out of it, but there's still a lot I do not know. Following through on that mission, in the last 3 weeks (semester break from school that ends tonight), I enrolled in a bunch of courses and picked up a few books.

See - studying at 1 AM

1. For the first few weeks, I'm going to brush up my basics in C and learn some of the more advanced things the language has to offer
2. I enrolled in CS50x for like the 4th or 5th time and will try to complete it this time (no promises)
3. I enrolled in this for AI program (Python based). It's the first (non-school) in-person course I've ever enrolled in. I've done all of my learning online before this. I haven't actually enrolled in the course yet. There is an entry test involved. I appeared in the test and am now waiting for the results. If I pass, I'm in!
4. I started Eloquent JavaScript again to improve my JavaScript skills

This site helped me pass my Data Structures course last semester

That's about it! This may seem a lot but really isn't. At most I've planned to give one-hour to my personal code education per week for now. (That's apart from school and work). This is all for now. This isn't a very well crafted post since I hadn't really planned this (sorry for that). I do plan on making this blog a little useful and actually posting some tutorials or tips here, but that's after I free up some serious time to dedicate to this.

The AI Program - details at https://www.piaic.org/artificial-inteligence

Well, this is all! Until next time!

Best,
Ammar.

2017 ends in 54 hours and 16 minutes and as you'd expect, we're going to spend these last hours looking back onto the year behind us.

As the title suggests 2017 wasn't great for me talking in term of code. I wrote so little code this year it's embarrassing. Now don't get me wrong here, it's not that I didn't code - I coded a lot actually. I started a Digital Media Agency with three friends (check it out here) and did a lot of professional work in the last four months, but I did not learn anything new. The work I did was mostly web-based and it required everything I already knew how to do. If I spend 10 hours making something that doesn't teach me something new about this field, then I don't consider that time well spent at all because what's the point of repeating what I already know. To code is to improve every time. So talking in that sense, it has been a bad year for "code.Ammar{}".

On the other hand, this year I finally graduated from High School and moved to a university(College(??)) to study Software Engineering. Although in the first semester there wasn't much to learn as they mainly taught the basics and being this field for as long as I have been, I can at least say that I've got the basics down. BUT still, it was a learning experience nonetheless as I got back to a language I had said goodbye to a long time ago i.e C#

Although a few years ago I shifted to web development completely, and as much of a great decision it was, getting back to Windows/Desktop App development was quite a refresher and really good in the sense of code experience. I learned a lot of things about C#, such as the fact that you can code C# in Linux, and made a not-so-cool final semester project in like an hour(Check it out) and helped a few other with theirs too!

In conclusion, this year wasn't great for my personal coding journey and I hope 2018 will be an improvement to that, but on the other hand, this year I started studying code "professionally" and well, life's been good. Doing what I love at school, well that's the dream.

I guess that's enough sulking for this post, see you next year! Oh yeah and a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!

I started the #100DaysOfCode challenge some time ago, as announced on this blog. I had some complications in between and re-started the challenge, but a few days into it again and I've realized something: This challenge isn't for me.

Learning CSS isn't an easy task - after getting the basic structure down, learning advance things can get difficult. One of the most important part of CSS are selectors. Targeting specific elements is a very important part of creating designs and mastering selectors is very important for that reason.

Now after a while, CSS can get boring and most people just skip learning advance selectors all together. Well recently I found a really fun way to learn and practice CSS selectors - from the basic ones all the way to the advance ones.

Meet CSS Diner

The past weeks has been sort-of great for me in a way. I've had a lot of people tell me that I'm great at coding/programming and that I should look for a coding job. Hearing that gives me an incredible boost of self confidence but usually this statement follows with a question: "Where did you learn to code?", and then my usual reply: "Online, for free."

Cue a lot of questions about "How is that possible" and "Is it effective" and "Is it free" to finally, "Tell me how I can do that too". That is exactly what I'm going to do in this post but first, let's answer a question.

It's been a while since I took the "#100DaysOfCode challenge", so I wanted to provide an update on that.

I've posted multiple times about un-productivity and quitting MOOCs. The last few weeks were really unproductive for me (more here) and I was thinking about leaving CS50x, again!

I've been an unproductive monster and I've slowly started to recover in the writing side by posting three posts last week, but I've made little progress in the code side of things. So, to get on top of that, I've decided to start #100DaysOfCode!

It's been a while since I've posted about CS50 on this blog. My last post was about ending Week 1, which was almost 3 months ago. To be honest, I haven't made much progress after that. I've been extremely unproductive the last couple of weeks, and now, I'm going to talk about what's up.

I never thought I would be able to write this post before my exams but here I am.

This is the problem I have with committing to something - school makes it really hard for me to keep my commitment but I'm trying my best with CS50.

Anyhow, approximately 11 weeks after signing up for this course, I'm finally done with Week 1!


via GIPHY

As I said in a previous post, water.c was no problem at all.

Mario.c took me a while to crack [ Details here ] but eventually I did crack it.

Now the last challenge was Greedy.c, which was described by someone in the CS50 Facebook group, as "A monster of it's own".

So now it was time to crack Greedy!

It's a known fact - to get better at CSS, you need to practice( a lot!! ).

I personally recommend copying live sites rather than building websites from PSDs.

Why?

Because most PSDs are really hard to work with and are hard to extract content from.

Websites on the other hand are easy and when you're done copying the site, you can check out the websites source code to check out how the developer structured his site and compare it to yours.

This will help you out a lot! You'll be surprised at how fast you'll get good with CSS by copying sites. This is what I did too and still do!

Here are some extensions that I personally use on Chrome to help me with the process of copying. Some of these are also available on other browsers.