Practice, practice, practice!

As you may or may not know, I am currently going through The Odin Project to improve my knowledge of coding and web design, and to become better and maybe someday find a job in the field. I know it's difficult and may not work out, but I really enjoy doing it so I will pursue it as much as I can.

That being said, while some people try to get through the course as quickly as possible and some even submit the bare minimum for projects, I like to take it a bit more slowly.

For example, when I work on a project, I want it to fit my vision and I challenge myself to implement things that may be difficult at first, and that require some research or learning on my part. I want this knowledge. I don't want to say: I don't know how to do this, so I won't. Or: This seems difficult so I will give up.

But sometimes I have to consider if it may be too far beyond the scope of the exercise and not worth the effort at this point in time. This is not me giving up, this is me putting a pin in it and deciding that it would be detrimental to my work on the project and on my growth as a programmer to keep going in this way. And this has been difficult for me to understand sometimes.

Another example is when I learn something new that I decide to put into action right away. I recently paused my progress on The Odin Project, because I had learned about accessibility and how to make your websites easier for all people to use. This is something that I was only aware of in passing so far. I knew about aria, but I didn't really know how to implement it myself other than just leaving it as it is in bootstrap. And while I do love bootstrap, I'm trying to do more and more html, css and JS by myself, and this includes accessibility.

So after I finished the lessons about accessibility I went back to old websites I had made for myself and friends, as well as the website you are using right now, and made sure they are accessible to the best of my current abilities. I also removed as much bootstrap as I could in favor of my own code. This took me a couple of months to do, but I believe it was a worthy exercise to practice these accessibility features and rules and to not forget about them for the future. I want to be inclusive. I want everyone to enjoy the things I make. Right now I am using tools to check for accessibility but I want to try to improve on the workflow to make sure I don't forget about it in the future.

If you find something that feels like it lacks accessibility, please do not assume that I didn't care, but that my learning journey just hadn't reached that point yet, or that I simply didn't quite get it right. Feel free to mail me about it, and I will try to fix it.

In the meantime, I will continue learning and improving! I hope you have a great day, wherever you are.