npm start - Making of Denial Bagel

Never have I ever imagined I would on eday build a website. Growing up I had never been sharp with technology. I never passed one single coding class, and had zero interest in anything code related.

Until...I injured myself in a backpacking trip and had to stay home and rest for a few months. (read about my accident here). With the newly acquired free time, the idea occured to me.

What started as a fleeting thought stayed in the back of my head, marinated for a few days until I decided to give it a go. For one week I went through a 5 hour HTML and CSS tutorial, hence the making of this website.

Now, like I said, I am not the sharpest person when it comes to anything tech related. So you can imagine, the making of this website has not been a walk in the park. There were so many times where I thought about giving up and turn to one of those websites that help you make websites for help, instead of doing it on my own from Hello World. But I needed to prove a point to myself.

Over two months of coding every single day, I have at least gotten the hang of things. Though half the time I am sat in front of my computer starting at %<{}$%#(*$U s, I would curse at myself under my breath like a grumpy grandma, questioning my sanity.

The perfect representation of me coding doesn't exi...

A few things I learned while building this

1. Not to jump into rabbit holes of web design inspirations

There are a crap load of good-looking websites out there, and my one is not gonna look like all of them. Stop trying to create the perfect website and just do what feels YOU.

2. Just start

I did a 5-hour html & css tutorial before starting this project. After the tutorial, I opened a new folder in VS code, stared blankly into it for a good 5 minutes. “Okay, what now?” I felt I was lacking so much knowledge and I needed to know everything there is to know about making a website. Luckily, my friend Walter gave a helping hand to stop me from falling into the bubbling lava of the infamous tutorial hell. JUST START, he said, and whenever you encounter problems, you look for specific solutions.

3. A lot of things aren’t as easy as it seems

The biggest shock I got from doing this project was how time consuming making a website is. Granted, I might be baised due to the fact that I am a complete beginner. More experienced web developers probably do things 5x faster than I do, if not more. Though despite that, it blew my mind knowing the infinite nuances that goes into making a website. From the never-ending CSS attributes there are, to the importance of a space, hyphen, don’t even get me started on flexbox…

Anyway, my point is, skimming through at a simple website like mine might only take a few minutes, but I worked every day for two months in order to get it live, not to mention the constant updates and improvements I will need. This realization made me appreciate every creation so much more. When I look at other websites, blogs, videos, or any other creations, I now see beyond the products. I see the person behind the screen/canvas, lips stained with coffee, glasses sliding down the nose bridge, cursing for the 6th time in an hour because CSS is being CSS again.

Website credits and thank yous

I can't thank my good friend, Walter Augustine, enough. As a developer, he generously spent time coding with me outside his work hours. With a 12-hour time difference between us, he patiently handled my flood of coding questions, messy code and silly bugs. He helped me debug, shared insider tips and tricks from his decade of full-time coding experience. This would not have been possible without his help.