One of my favorite things about coding is how it feeds into my innate curiosity. There’s always something new to learn and the answer you need is surely out there somewhere, if you know where to look and how to phrase the question. Which is how the Free Code Camp user story that briefly stumped me yesterday:
User Story #6: The.main-sectionelements should contain at least 5codeelements total (not each).
… (because we hadn’t actually covered <code> tags) led me to a delightful discovery today: HTML entities. Specifically the ones that allowed me to display tags in their literal entirety within the <code> tags: < and > for < and >. Less than (lt) and greater than (gt).
I don’t actually know why I’m so delighted by these little almost-but-not-quite random assortments of characters, but, aside from how they play into my lifelong love of language in the same way that JavaScript does, they also relate the aforementioned thing that I enjoy so much about this journey: coding just makes a certain kind of sense.
That’s not to say it always makes sense to me (I’m two-thirds of the way through building a technical documentation page about the DOM and I still don’t thoroughly understand it), but I feel like, given enough time and effort, whatever I want to understand eventually could actually make sense to me. And whenever I doubt that (and I often do), I just look back at what I knew when I began and how much I’ve come to know since I started this journey a few months ago. Back when I first got curious and peeked under the hood at the HTML running the site on which I spend my days and had no clue what I was looking at, or when I decided to give this coding thing a try and peeked at the lines of JS behind the blocks and wondered if I’d ever be able to decipher them.
I can now. And I can’t wait to see where I’ll be able to go from here.
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