2020 hindsights

What do you find challenging about coding?
i don’t see the point in twisting it; everything about coding, except the actual coding (the typing) is challenging. it’s one of the most fundamentally challenging things i could imagine. you’re making something so complex out of an infinite number of possible combinations of “code” where even one space or capital letter could bring the entire house of cards every time you strike your keyboard. and it has to be able to read your audience’s mind, and interact with them in any number of ways without straying from the illusion of stability.

Talk about a project that disappointed you. What would you change?
early on, every project disappointed me. i made a resume using css grid for my first project and it was so terrible i wouldn’t even dare try fixing it. i made a calculator app with boiler plate code that i still might not fully understand if i went back to it and certainly couldn’t build from scratch yet. i did a towers of hanoi thing that took much collaboration to get working, and the same is true of a pig latin translator app. who wouldn’t change something about some code they ever worked on though? and who can really say they understood every reason their code even works once a project is “complete?” so i think it’s more important to continue tackling new projects than worry about what you could have changed. and if you ever get the notion, return to them and maybe even start from scratch once more.

List three key things to consider when coding with SEO in mind.
1. use meaningful tags like <main>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, and so on instead of equally effective <div>’s that are semantically meaningless and won’t increase the search relevance of your content for anyone who would actually want to read it.
2. use appropriate titles for your website and its content, along with proper metadata.
3. link relevant websites within your website.

List five or more ways you could optimize a website to be as efficient and scalable as possible.
using node express recently has certainly showed me many ways to do that. using controllers and routes in their own folders while keeping your index.js nice and tidy is definitely one way to make your website much more efficient and scalable. using D.R.Y. (don’t repeat yourself) is certainly helpful in making your code run more efficiently. using functional programming or OOP (object-oriented programming) principles such as such as encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, and abstraction will efficiently scale your website if you know what you’re doing (and there’s really no way around using some of these principles if you have an efficient website at all). there’s tons of frameworks out there as well which take efficiency and scalability to a whole new level, such as React, Vue, Elm, Angular, etc.