Principles and Practices
Assignment
- Come up with an idea for a final project
- Start learning HTML/CSS in order to create my website
Final Project
The first week of Fab Academy had started, and we got the assignment of thinking about an idea for our final project. My initial thought is not to make something I can sell or make a company of afterwards. Instead I should be careful to choose the project I can learn the most from. Internet of things and safety aspects are both topics that I'm interested in. Making a safe with a locker connected to the internet might be a possibility or maybe even adding a camera. For a camera to work with the internet of things I would have to implement some kind of AI software. Unfortunately I don't have the coding experience to make an AI software myself, but I found that amazon has one that does facial recognition. The different possibilities of including software is something I will have to investigate further.
I have not made a decision on a final project yet, but I know the elements that it should contain: a physical object connect to the internet of things and possibly with AI. Underneath I have made a sketch showing the different faces my project is involving when working properly.
The good thing about this project is that it has several steps of complexity so I can always keep adding things or stop developing it if time management becomes a problem. I will still have a product if I “only” manage to make a box that takes a picture when opened, since this solution will also increase the overall security and therefore have a purpose.
To see more about my final project go to "Final Project", which will by updated as the weeks go by.
Learning HTML and CSS
Besides thinking about an idea for the final project, the week was also spend making an HTML website. Our local instructor began by giving us a introduction to coding in HTMl and recommended Codeacademy for us to get familiar with HTML and CSS.
Codeacademy was great because of its repetitive structure, which made you get confident with the syntax. After getting somewhat confident with HTML and CSS I decided to find out how I could make some of the individual parts for my website by looking at examples from W3schools.
The picture above is actually from a lesson in parallaxing when scrolling on a website, but found the design to be quite beautiful looking. So I decided to implement some of its features by looking at the source code.
I had alot of trouble centering the headline in the background picture that i had chosen, but finally it did work. The picture is actually taken in Spinderihallerne where oure lab is located. My website is far from done, but i'm happy with the way it has turned out so far.
Even though I had troubles doing specific things in HTML/CSS, I was a bit surprised that it was not harder than this to read and write HTML/CSS. I believe most of the difficulties lies within knowing how HTML and CSS speak together and relate to each other. Another thing I found important when writing websites like this is that it pays off being very strict and structured since it will make editing and adding changes later way easier. Comments especially helped me avoiding making things into one big mess.
Later I found a cheat sheet like the one you see the top page of underneath to be very helpful in remembering all of the different tags you can play around with, but I'm sure when I have to edit the site every week, most of it will soon become muscle memory. But I like to think of sheets like this as a dictionary, as if I was learning a new language.
