Fear of Coding
Threshold
Before they know it, they are sitting in their first Multimedia Authoring class. The Professor stands before them, a monolith of knowledge. A monolith with a very fun patterned button-up, that is. They will be our hero’s guide through this journey.
The Professor opens Sublime. Our hero does the same. This is it: HTML. Suddenly, a doctype declaration, an html tag, and a paragraph section appears. Open in browser. The teacher’s screen shows the paragraph, small black text on a plain white background.
Our hero’s screen is white.
Why? They followed along. The doctype, the tags, the text…what could be wrong? They begin to comb through what little code they have. It seems to match…
The Professor, in all their awe-inspiring mastery, approaches our hero’s raised hand. They look over their shoulder and…missing the paragraph closing tag. Gotcha.
The journey becomes more and more arduous. Now, we see our hero grappling with CSS. They struggle. The office hours of the Professor becomes a safe haven, a beacon that cuts through the clouds. There is no problem that cannot be explained away rather quickly.
Ryan's Tip:
"When you're coding you may think that your code errors will be from some algorithm or piece of logic you got wrong. For me personally, it's the small things that I overlook. Coding includes tons and tons of typing! When you’re writing an essay, spell check is your best friend. Unfortunately there isn't a tool as intuitive as spell check for coders. You may not even realize that you have made a mistake until you run your code and it comes back with errors. I make sure to skim over the last five or so lines of code that I have written to see if I have made any obvious errors. When my code runs and returns errors, the first thing I do is assume it's either a typo of some kind or I've forgotten a semicolon. Syntax is important and failure to adhere to your coding languages rules will result in many errors!"
Jessica Grubbs' Tip:
"Validate. Validate. Validate! You will not regret it. Beautify your code. This helps with understanding your structure."