Finishing the first three WODs was certainly something of an experience for me! The biggest takeaway was that I need to make sure I read everything correctly before trying to do it as I have definitely missed a few steps doing the WODs. I actually did each WOD twice, although I never recoreded the first attempts as those were me learning how to do it as part of my learning process since I learn best by doing something as I read or hear about it. I wouldn’t watch the videos until I was absolutely stuck and could not figure out how to finish a WOD during the initial attempts, but on the recordings I make sure I get an Rx rating by setting a timer to be one minute less than the time needed to hit Rx (e.g. if a Rx rating is achieved by doing the WOD in <10 minutes, I set my timer for 9 minutes). Since I was essentially doing a “practice run” of each WOD, I figured I should be hitting the Rx times in one or two recorded attempts.
BrowserHistory1 was fairly easy to do, but I did that particular one three or four times since I kept misreading the instructions. At one point, I actually made a table of contents that did not even link to the different sections in the webpage – they linked to external sites because I thought I was supposed to link each heading in the table to an external site, which in hindsight I realize that defeats the entire purpose of a table of contents. This started to solidify the proverb “measure twice and cut once” into my brain since it actually fits quite well in both reading comprehension (read it as many times as you need to get it right!) and actually programming the webpage itself.
BrowserHistory2 was difficult for me due to more user error – I was stuck on this for a few days due to the fact that http-server failed to show me the change in font for my webpage, so I did not move past the first step of the WOD. Always check your webpage by opening the html file itself in a web browser, it’ll show if the changes are indeed working or not! Thankfully, the live-server command was able to properly reflect the changes I made to the CSS file and made me hate making CSS files much, much less. After figuring out all of that, the rest of the excercise was quite enjoyable since I felt like I had a better command over CSS since I can see the changes I was making to the file as I was working on it.
BrowserHistory3 was the one that was deceptively easy-looking when it was probably the hardest one of the bunch. What got me on this one was the columns – when I first read the instructions, I decided to look up how to format columns in CSS and initially used the column-count code. However, my columns were ugly and not as pretty as the one in the picture so I spent a couple of hours tinkering with the body to make it look as it did in the picture. I thought I was on the right track too because the left and right columns were aligned, but the middle one was not – this would lead me to separating each section using <div> and chaing my CSS so that <div> would be a single column, which also did not work at all. After a couple of more hours being stumped, I took a look at the video and learned two things: 1) how to properly complete the WOD, and 2) I once again misread the instructions because we were supposed to swap one of the sections around to be in a different spot.
Long story short, the “measure twice and cut once” mentality can be used in a surprising amount of situations.