dusty

Deployment is going well. It could be worse. It could be better. I’ve had both. Currently I am the Platoon Sergeant of a platoon and our mission is base operations. It takes a good chunk of time out of my day. So does everyone else’s jobs. I’m fortunate in that I have some good NCOs who are Squad Leaders and Team Leaders. They do their jobs well, maintain standards, and try to make everyone around them better. It’s all about people.

Often times I am pulled away from my usual duties so that I can sit on an escort. A long day in a vehicle in the sun. I generally drink a lot of water and read. However, currently I’m on project two of my front end developer course that I’ve paid for (well worth the money). I’m working on the CSS of a simple webpage, and I’ve come to realize that the course designers, while making only a single page assignment, were deliberate in their choice of design.

But I’ll get to that in a later post, as I’ve scrapped my CSS code three times and started afresh. Yes, it was working, but it felt hodgepodge. Many years ago I was taking Tae Kwon Do and was working on some punches in a kata. Sensei came over to me and said that was a perfectionist and it was okay to move on. I said that I was trying to learn the essence of the fundamental before moving on. She smiled and left me to my exercise.

Yes, I’ve scrapped and rewritten the CSS three times (and maybe again) as I am still working on the fundamentals. An important element in CSS is cascading and I don’t want to simply throw out a lot of single element identifiers. I want to combine them, classes with elements with IDs, and use no more than I have to. And boy but aren’t floating those containers causing havoc. It isn’t unlike using Microsoft Word, where one adds a simple paragraph return, and suddenly everything shifted, two extra pages were added, and far away… sirens.

Add to this that while I sat out in the hot humvee for several hours working on my code, I had no internet and could not look up help or advice on different CSS properties. It was experimentation, and dev tools in Chrome.

But I look forward to it. It’s fun. Frustrating… but fun.