What Is a Coding Library? Wonderful. That’s What It Is. | R100 Series

The LinkedIn post I’m looking at here is from the days JUST before I actually started the 1/100 count for the Hundred Days of Coding series on LinkedIn. Here, I’m swooning over how wonderful Bootstrap is.

Just for the record, I hate frontend stuff.

Frontend (from scratch) involves a lot of fine work fiddling with padding and margin numbers … and then you have to do it all over again when you do it for mobile (and tablet, if you’re a glutton for punishment).

But libraries (frameworks?) like Bootstrap have a lot of that settled:

So far I've kind of been able to blitz HTML and CSS. I basically get it. There was this one button I copy-pasted from one of those part builder websites and it was like cup of noodle soup that violently assaulted itself before I was able to eat it.

Yes, I did get edible noodles. Yes, the hover color change worked.

But.

The sizing.

I've had indeterminate garments worn by 74-armed aliens that fit me for reasons I could more clearly understand.

I don't know why it worked. Or didn't, as the case may be.

So in this coding practice session, I tried copy-pasting the code for a button. But it didn’t work.

When my HTML and CSS books arrive next week, I'll try to work back through the basics and hand-code some of my own stuff just to make sure I get the basics.

That’s pretty straightforward: I wanted to get more into the basics of HTML and CSS.

Now I’d like nothing more than to sign it all over to the lovely frontend people, barricade myself in the server room, and only discuss frontend through a communication tube constructed Howard Hughes-style out of plastic drinking straws stuck together with the wrappers from single-use jam packets.

Now I'm learning about Bootstrap and swooning. It's also making sense of why coding today involves so many libraries. WE NEED A WEBSITE. FLASH. ZIP. BOOM. HERE YA GO. AND IT'S PRETTY.

And we just assembled code from a library.

So yeah. With a libramework (framebrary?) like Bootstrap, you can just put in some keywords in key places in your HTML and it’s all pretty and works at different sizes.

And it looks like stuff on the rest of the internet, too.