One my fears before starting to code was that it was this big daunting field of science that I couldn’t learn how to use. Throughout the years, I would accidently click “inspect element” on a webpage and then I would see all the code and just be so dumbfounded about how people create these webpages and the idea of writing 200+ lines of code made me nervous about the whole thing. But in the recent months, I told myself that I would learn how to code this summer — not even knowing that I would get this amazing opportunity. When I received a message about EMPOWERED from Ms. McClain, the program supervisor, I got so excited because I was finally learning how to code. The first day of coding was fairly simple in my opinion, but the second day was just an overwhelming amount of information to process. Actually learning how to write an html code was a long process, but with each new tag I put into the workspace I got more excited for the coming weeks in EMPOWERED. The third day of coding was really fun because I just turned off the video lessons and tried to personalize my website. I had more fun playing around with stuff and I started to get more familiar with html and css. My website is not very close to being completed, but I am very excited to finish coding the rest of it! Coding now, is not as daunting as it was beforehand and it is just very fun to learn how to code. I am just so glad I got the opportunity to be apart of EMPOWERED.

 

Getting the opportunity to sit on the meeting between Doe Anderson and “Future Up” (the former JCPE Foundation) was a really exciting, interesting, and nerve-racking experience. Before the meeting I was kind of nervous because I wasn’t sure what to expect of the two parties and I wasn’t sure of what they expected of me. Although I was nervous, that was nothing compared to how excited I was to be apart of the meeting. Just knowing that this was a legit business meeting contributed to that excitement. One of the highs of the meeting was definitely listening and understanding the marketing process. I found it interesting to see how marketers make decisions. However, while we were physically apart of the meeting, there were points where I felt we weren’t actually involved in the discussion. Overall, I thought it was a great experience.

This week we finally got to start using WordPress to create our websites for the “Future Up” challenge. It is much easier to use WordPress than writing the html and css from scratch because of the simple work space that allows you to choose whatever you want to go on your website. While it is much easier, I do “miss” writing the html and css and I find html/css easier to personalize. For example, not all the themes have the same features so it can be difficult to work around and sometimes the components don’t look exactly the way you want it to look. But within the time-frame we have, I think WordPress is definitely the best option to build our website.