Sorry this is late! I thought that I'd scheduled it, but when I logged in to ConvertKit today, I saw it as a draft 🤦.

Also, my video for this week ended up having a big issue and I wanted to put out something quick so I've used this newsletter as a script for my Wednesday video... so when it comes out, it might look familiar 🙂.

Hello Reader,

One of the hardest things to do as a student, hobbyist, or beginner, is figuring out what to build next.

I love websites like Frontend Mentor and iCodeThis for helping people, especially beginners, get past that block.

The problem is, you probably don’t want a bunch of Frontend Mentor projects in your portfolio, because everyone else is also doing those.

Take them to the next level

One option is to take these to the next level.

Even if you take a relatively simple challenge on Frontend Mentor, you can level that up quite a lot.

For example, with the one I linked to there, you could:

• Add a dropdown menu that allows for different color themes.
• Make the color themes more dynamic by adding a color picker to the page, to allow the user to update the accent color.
• Create multiple versions of the card that account for different situations, like having no image at the top, multiple tags, and how it might handle long titles or descriptions.
• Create a form that you could fill out, and then add new cards that are populated by the form data.

And that’s just a few ideas of what you can do with a very simple challenge!

Just remember, if you’re going to put a free challenge you found online in your portfolio, anyone reviewing your portfolio has seen the exact same thing thousands of times.

Those challenges are great for getting in practice of building out things based on a design, but don’t limit yourself to the scope of the challenge.

Use them for inspiration

If you start pushing those types of challenges and building more on top of them, you’ll start learning a lot more, both in terms of technical skill, but you’ll also get to flex your creative muscles in thinking outside of the box/scope of the project.

That alone can lead to you creating something pretty cool that you want to show off, or better yet, it might even inspire you to build out something else that’s a more complete project, and that’s not based on a challenge a lot of people have already completed.

And if you struggle to come up with ideas for personal projects that are more than a standard to-do app, I’ll be talking more about those next week 🙂.

📊 Poll results

In my last email, I asked people how they'd rate their CSS skills, and over 51% of people voted for intermediate.

I was expecting the results to be a little more even than that, with the beginner and advanced getting ~20% and ~25% respectively, with the rest going to just starting to learn it.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

No, Flexbox isn’t “good enough”

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You might have noticed I’ve had a lot of Flexbox and Grid content lately, and this will be the last of it for a little while 😅.

The reason I made this video is because in all of those other videos, when I’d mention using Grid over Flexbox for certain layouts, in the comments and on social media I’d get enough “eh, Flexbox is good enough for everything” comments.

They annoyed me enough that I had to make a video about it!

I also still get comments from people telling me that they avoid Grid because of browser support, so I also bring that up near the end too, because I have a feeling a lot of people avoiding Grid are using gap with Flexbox, and other common features that have worse support than Grid.

An easy fix for an annoying CSS transition issue

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If you’ve ever transitioned the scale of an element and run into z-index issues, where the element will jump back behind other elements, I look at a very easy fix for it in this video.

🏁

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

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