This class was an interesting view into web development, while I do have quite a bit of general tech experience web design is something that I have had almost no real experience with. I haven't touched any aspect of web design since high school about a decade ago and that was with Adobe Dreamweaver, which goes to show how outdated my perspective is and how fast the world of web has evolved. Taking Javascript before definitely helped, I knew Javascript was a large part of web design, but I had no idea it was so feature full, there’s so much that can be done with just Javascript it’s insane.

One thing that I noticed from my limited web experience before, and seems more prevalent now (but that could just be my limited experience) is how fragmented the whole experience feels. It’s a weird balance of multiple difference languages, mainly HTML, CSS, and Javascript fighting over different aspects of the page, all utilizing their own syntaxes. It feels like a standard of standards, HTML5 introduced new features that needed javascript before, Javascript can still do these things, but their implementations are different and there’s no real right way to do things, it feels like your making 3 different programs at times at when it’s at its worst, but when you manage to get everything to play nice together, it’s great to see where everything is separated to all responsible for their own aspects of your functioning page.

The implementation of Javascript also has this weird fragmented feel. While it is feature full, it seems weird that library dependencies are almost required. Most jobs have things like jQuery as a requirement, then there are even more libraries to stack on top of that like the UI component of jQuery or Bootstrap, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, all with their own syntaxes to learn, it becomes very overwhelming very quickly.
Looking into jobs, it seems like most really want you to be proficient in the main 3 aspects of web design, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, in addition to a regular college education, which of course makes a lot of sense. Beyond the entry level, a lot start to ask for more specific aspects of the languages, such as jQuery and JSON as well as other aspects we didn’t really touch on like cloud applications and .NET framework.

Then actually interacting with content management systems was an interesting perspective as well. Switching from having to move, display, and align everything with lines of code it was strange to be able to build a full website by just dragging and dropping blocks and have visual feedback on how everything was going to look. It definitely made designing the website a lot easier, even if having that full modular control was more difficult if elements didn’t want to fit together properly or would sometimes not cooperate with their placement. While a content management system definitely made the design of a website incredibly simple, it was nice to know what the system was actually doing behind the scenes to get the results we were looking at.

Everything considered this was a very enlightening class. I’m surprised to see how much there is going on for every website, and now to have an idea of what is actually happening in the background. Something that I’ve interacted with almost every day of my life, it’s neat to see what it’s actually made of, like reading a different language. When building the webpages for assignments it’s was always super satisfying to see something work in real time. The visual aspect of web design was definitely my favorite part, seeing lines of text form visual elements like menu bars, spyrographs, and even full games is way more fulfilling than just seeing a result print in plaintext from a basic C program, even if the difficulty and results are the same. Having all the work be accessible and posted to an actual website definitely added to this aspect, seeing the website grow week after week was very satisfying and having it actually having its own spot on the web makes it feel like carving out my own strange corner of the internet, like the Geocities pages of my childhood.

While web design probably won’t be my future in computer science, it was really cool to learn about and just mess around with it. I learned that front end developing is definitely one of my weakest skills with computers, so it was great to try to improve on that a little, even if I still am not great at it, I can at least understand a little more of what goes into it. Knowing more is never a bad thing, and the class definitely showed me a lot, and now I have my own website to show for it.