Framing my self in UI frameworks
05 Sep 2019
This week I learned about UI frameworks. I thought that UI frameworks are relatively easy to get started. However, learning UI frameworks was not a smooth one. Some of the troubles I had initially with UI frameworks were getting the picture, alignment of words and implementing grids. But in the end, my experience with UI frameworks was good overall.
UI framework
I think the UI framework is relatively easy to get started. What I mean by that is to use UI frameworks to get some results fast. I have learned the programming language C before, and it took me more than 6 months to code something that actually did something useful. However, with UI frameworks, I was able to imitate the look of a website in a week. There is much more to learn; because currently, the websites I made with UI frameworks are not functional. There are no links that connect pages, and no clickable elements on my website. I hope to learn that next week.
Challenges
My initial experience with UI frameworks was rough. Initially, I did not know how to do anything. I did not know how to align the text in a way that I wanted to. Now I learned that adding certain class names will help me to align my text. If I wanted to center my menu I created, I just add the keyword “center” to my class. If I wanted to align my item to the right, then I will type “right item” instead of “item” for my class. It was that easy. I also had a very hard time getting pictures from websites. This was solved by saving the picture locally and using that file to print to my website. The picture problem was the easiest problem to fix. Then there was the grid problem. I did not know how to make a grid for my website. I had to go to office hours to fix this problem. My professor kindly taught me to use a class called “ui two column grid”. I fiddled around with the code to figure out where the text went for that class. That was when I realized that changing the two in that class to a three will change the number of columns. This was a revelation for me. I realized how “English” the UI framework was. Now I am very fond of UI frameworks for how intuitive they can be.
Summary
My experience with UI frameworks was good overall. In the beginning, things were very stressful because I did not know anything. The website I first created looked like junk. In the first two days I coded, I did not think I will be able to do what I can do now. all of my text and images were tightly together, and the colors I wanted did not show up on the screen. But as I learned and practice I got better quite fast. In about 5 hours, I felt comfortable enough that I felt ready to take my weekly exam called a WOD. In the end, I was not able to finish my WOD, but I was very close. The only thing I could not do was to eliminate the white spaces at the edge of my website. That was resolved by removing the UI container that I surrounded my code with. my experience with UI frameworks was enjoyable, and I am looking forward to learning more about it starting next week.