First of all, I am not a graduate of computer science nor do I have any knowledge of programming or coding before I ventured into tech. Introduction My name is Jimoh Hameed, I'm from Kogi State, I graduated from the Kogi State University now known as Prince Audu Abubakar University (PAAU) where I obtained a BSc in Chemistry. The first child of three children. This is just my brief history. My tech journey started when I went for my NYSC program (must requirements for graduates in my country before they can be employed) right from the onset in NYSC during camping they were an emphasis on skills acquisition and entrepreneur development(SAED), these skills will prepare us for life after the program in case we do not get our dream job or even after getting the dream job we could use these skills as another means of generating income. I never took them seriously as I believed everything will fall in place once I finished NYSC, because of how we were compelled to join or learn a skill I joined a tye and dye class because I thought it was easy and less stressful. Well, I learned a lot about tye and dye and I'm happy I did. After camping was over, all my friends were into one skill or the other some were into fashion designing, catering, shoe making, hair styling, nails technician, etc. I was still not doing anything, then one fateful day I was surfing the net and I saw the amount of money a programmer made from designing a website right there I decided I was going to learn web design and developent, and the passion to learn it grew. I thought it was going to be an easy ride little did I know that I was about to embark on a very rough and challenging journey but at the end of it, I would reap the benefits of all the work and effort I put into it. Learning web designing I started making my research on how to learn web design and I learned that I would, first of all, need a good and working laptop, patience, time, dedication, and constant practice. All these I had and was ready to give my all to learning. I told my parents to send my laptop from home to where I was serving which they did. I looked for an institute and discovered Mactech computer institute in Osogbo, Osun state where I enrolled and began my journey into tech officially.
Learning HTML
HTML stands for Hypertext Mark-up language, it is a markup language that is used to structure the web page, it consists of various elements and these elements tell the browsers how to display these contents. Some basic elements of HTML include < DOCTYPE HTML > - This shows that the document is an html5 document.
- This is the root element of the HTML page as everything is written under it.
- This contains the meta-information about the page
- This element displays the title of the web page on the browser's title bar.
- This is where the content of the web page is put. Contents like headings, images, hyperlinks, forms, tables, etc. Some basic features of HTML are : HTML uses tags ( tags are characters that sit inside angled brackets)to give the information they surround special meaning. HTML tags usually come in pairs. The opening tags signify the beginning of the content and the closing tag which signifies the end of that content. HTML is a very basic aspect of web development and simple to understand, with the right attitude and commitment you can learn it in 3 weeks or a month.
Learning CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, this is a language that we use to style or design the HTML document, it controls how elements should look and appear on the screen. CSS is made up of selectors and declarations. The selectors are used to specify the element you want to design and the declarations are used to describe what HTML elements should look like. This declaration is further divided into two which are a) the property of the element you want to change. b ) the value you want to assign to that particular property. This is a brief introduction to HTML and CSS, I will write a full and well-detailed article on HTML very soon and it is going to be an interesting one as I would try my possible best to break it down for easy understanding. It took about a month and a few weeks to understand HTML and CSS and to start using them to try out some projects. I would recommend articles on HTML and CSS, courses, and even videos if you want to understand HTML and CSS very well.
Even after our tutor was done teaching us in class, I will go back home to some articles and documents I downloaded from the internet about HTML and CSS and read them, I would also watch videos from YouTube and also practice to sharpen my knowledge.
I also use Twitter to learn and I follow a handful of programmers on Twitter, I follow programmers like Agba Akin, A.A. Abiodun, Yuri Lee, Danny Thompson, Suhail Kakar, and Brad Traversy, etc. These guys post a lot about tech and you could learn a lot from them.
Conclusion This is where I draw the curtain on my journey into tech and my first lessons on web development. Some days I was tired, and sometimes I would try and try but won't get the desired results but it was fun and I'm still enjoying it. In my next article, I'll discuss how I learned JavaScript and some of the projects I've been able to build with it. Thank you for reading.