This will be my final brief post of phase-0 of Dev Bootcamp. Prior to 9 weeks ago, I had never composed a single line of Ruby, HTML, or CSS, and had no idea what it meant to use a framework like Bootstrap for your CSS. As I reflect today, it's crazy to think how far I've come without yet starting the 'real deal' that is on-site Dev Bootcamp. As I transition to full-time DBC, I've taken on a new project that is going to be consuming the majority of my "free time for side projects", and so will likely not be maintaining this blog, at least for the next few months. Nevertheless, this last blog post recounts my experience transitioning this blog site from a static CSS structure to one that uses the Bootstrap CSS framework.
In a nutshell, I learned two things from today's foray into the world of Bootstrap.
- With programming, it is often easier to start from scratch than to fit an existing codebase into a new structure/framework/platform.
- DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a principle that isn't unique to Ruby. Bootsrap and many other frameworks out there all help developers to avoid writing repetetive code. While keeping in mind #1, we should always be on the lookout for ways to become more DRY.
Unfortunately, because I've already spent well over 4 hours today revamping my Github.io site using a Bootstrap CSS template (using the "agency" theme found here), I'm going to keep this blog post brief. Because of rule #1, the only page I ended up modifying is the home page. I was able to incorporate MOST everything a user would likely want to see from my site in the home page, but because all of the blog posts were previously built as static web pages, it would have taken many more hours of mindless copy/pasting and debugging in order to move over the entire site to this new style.However, if you navigate to the original home page, and compare to what you see now, the power of using a Bootstrap CSS template should be clearly understood. It would have taken me days of struggle to produce something this clean. Instead, it took a few hours, and I'm certain that my next site will be even faster.