Hello Reader,
You write a couple of lines of code, hit save and... nothing happens.
You check for typos and everything looks fine.
You open your dev tools and don't see anything that seems wrong.
Except, something is wrong because it isn't working!!!
Nothing is more frustrating than when something won't work, and you have no idea what the problem is.
Though, sometimes, the opposite is true, where you get something working and have no idea why it's working either, which can be equally frustrating.
To make it worse, when we get very stuck, it can cause feelings of self-doubt to start creeping in.
One of the reasons for this is learning resources and paths keep moving forward.
"You've completed this lesson, so you have all the knowledge you need here, time to move on!"
Learning doesn't work that way though.
Having learned something, and being able to do that same thing are very different things.
It's very normal for it to take time for concepts to sink in and make sense.
And while it would be nice if we could just go from lesson to lesson and absorb everything instantly, struggling with things is such an important part of learning.
They’re even a term for it, called Desirable Difficulty that was coined in 1994.
The idea with Desirable Difficulty is about how running into challenges that we struggle through is a key to long-term learning.
When we struggle through things, but then finally figure it out (and this doesn’t have to be on your own, it can be from the help of someone else explaining it to you, or a tutorial that helps things click), what you’ve learned will be much more sticky.
You’ll understand why it worked, and you’ll also have learned why what you were trying before didn’t work.
It can sometimes feel like you’ve wasted a bunch of time, but often, it’s the best way to learn, even if it’s frustrating at the moment.
It can be even worse if we pay attention to the progress everyone else around us seems to be making.
It’s important to know that everyone struggles though, and when they post on social media, they’re curating that timeline.
They want to celebrate the win, so they share that, but most won’t share the struggles they went through to get that win.
There’s also the false expectations of what being a “good developer” is.
In the last live stream I did, someone in the chat noted how cool it was to see me have to search MDN on how a CSS feature works.
If you watch a tutorial of mine, it might seem like I’m a CSS encyclopedia.
I think I know CSS pretty well at this point, but when I make a tutorial, I research everything ahead of time and build out the demo at least one time before recording.
I do this so we can focus on what the tutorial covers and to prevent it from dragging on forever as I debug something silly, but that is a big part of what I do every day!
We can’t remember everything, and we’ll never get something right every single time… but it’s all part of the journey to getting a little bit better at what we do 🙂.
🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week
My favorite tips from 2024
When I did my year-end review, I did a quick look at all the videos I put out, and it reminded me of some good tips that I shared!
So, I went back through and found my five favorites that didn’t involve cutting-edge stuff, meaning you can use all of these in your projects today if you’d like to!
Short of the week
Remove empty elements with one line of CSS - great for dynamic content
Tip of the week
This week’s HTML & CSS tip of the week looks at why I’ve stopped using text-wrap: nowrap for things like buttons, and started using min-inline-size: fit-content instead.
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🎙️ Podcast
Navigating CSS Layout Decisions
Inspired by recent articles from Andy Bell and Alex Riviere (linked in the links section below), I explore a bit of my own decision-making process when deciding between Flexbox and Grid.
This leads to me talking about intrinsic and content-first layouts as well, and how the most important thing is that we're thinking about the decisions that we're making.
LISTEN ON: APPLE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | WEB
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🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web
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Have yourself a fantastic week,
Kevin
P.S. I recently had a few people ask me if it would be possible to preview lessons from CSS Demystified, so I’ve unlocked the first 15 lessons from the course (excluding the intro module).
You can jump into the first unlocked lesson here, and make you’re way through those lessons if you’re interested 🙂.
Also, if you struggle with online/self-paced learning, in the top tier of the course I have an entire section about how to get the most out of it.
P.S.S. The course is a little old, but I’ve started planning a very big revamp for it. You can wait for the update if you’d prefer, but if you do enroll now, you will get access to the updated version when it’s released as well.
