Web Development

One of the first hands-on projects I coded was a simple “blog site” style website using HTML and CSS in my technology track class. I received inspiration from a variety of fields, and created a simple project I was proud of. This was also the first time that I can remember that I started seeing code, and becoming impatient with constant errors because I missed a semicolon or a comma, or misspelled a word. I enjoyed writing, and for me, this was a completely different realm unlike no other field. With minimal mistakes, and possible grammatical errors, a paper can be passed as adequate, but when it comes to coding or programming, everything must be in the right place or the entire program will fail. I learned this the hard way when I was working on the early projects in the class.

While the majority of the projects were conducted individually, one of our final projects was a group effort collaboration. I learned plenty from working with team members on a combined project. We were given freedom to create a website about one of the towns in Majuro, which is the capital of the Marshall Islands, in any way that we wanted. It was tricky at first because we were all new in this field, and had limited knowledge in aspects such as design, formatting and coding, but we picked a scope, and tried out best. I worked on the overall layout, and made sure the formatting was clear, and the structure was concise. It was one of the longest, and most challenging projects I had worked on in a group of people at that time, but it was this feeling of success every time something worked that got me into computer science initially.

Although the final project was initially planned on getting published to the World Wide Web, due to time constraints, lack of communication and project planning, it remained a personal project instead of a community product. My team and I were disappointed at first, but we learned valuable skills while developing the website, along with learning that for effective team communication, it is important to take initiative, and have our goals presented clearly and concisely.