On New Trajectories

I learned to code webpages back when tags were the trendiest new implementation. It was the age of Geocities, Tripod, and animated "under construction" gifs as far as Webcrawler could see. CSS was still a dream of the future, and I'm ashamed to say my knowledge of coding stopped there for at least five years.

See, I've always loved to build things, and I've always loved writing, but for some reason the idea of combining those two interests never occurred to me. Not seriously, at least. And whatever interest I had in coding was dashed by learning the basics of FORTRAN in a high school coding class. Okay, that might make me sound older than I am, because FORTRAN was already a dinosaur at the time.

Over the next decade, I dabbled a bit in web design, but once I discovered WordPress, most of my dallying with HTML and CSS came to an end. Life continued on, I pursued a few more degrees, and tacitly accepted that my humanities background and my--let's say strained--relationship with math meant I would never go any further than the surface level with my coding skills.

Needless to say, a few things have changed.

Over the past few weeks, and probably brewing under the surface over the previous months of the pandemic, I've been feeling an urge to stop procrastinating and really delve into the art of coding. After all, I study digital rhetoric and media, and I do want to be able to make things through code.

So, this is a start. I'm going to try to chronicle my attempts to find my way through the field of web development, refreshing my knowledge of the fundamentals before diving into the mysterious reaches of the back-end and into the expanding frontiers of JS frameworks.

I think it's going to be an adventure.