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Entry 2 – Time & Patience

2.28.26

I learned so many cool things today in my Responsive Web Design class, and I incorporated most of the element and attribute building blocks that we covered on my website in some form or another. Admittedly, I got distracted by creativity, but a big bonus was successfully linking my domain name to this website! No more github.io at the end. My official domain name is now frontendfrequencies.dev <– and this… getting that to highlight with a blue hyperlink—I learned how to do that too! It’s not like doing it in an email, where you just highlight the text and click the link button.

To manually hyperlink frontendfrequencies.dev using HTML, on the back end, it looks like this:

<a href="https://frontendfrequencies.dev/" target="_blank">frontendfrequencies.dev</a>

Pretty cool, right?!

Achievements

Challenges

The only true challenges for me today were tiny little typos that I struggled to catch. For example, when I was tasked with debugging someone else’s code, I failed to catch a / in the end tag </h3>. And when trying to embed an image on a webpage, I kept writing “herf” but learned (after many failed attempts) that it is actually spelled href, h-r-e-f. I made up a little mental trick to help me stop calling it “herf” (like Nerf Gun) in my head, and that’s:

h = “Hey!”
ref = “Reference this URL.”

Silly, but it really helped me complete the lesson.

Final Thoughts

The big thing I took away from today is the importance of patience. Like I said, there was a moment today (for about 45 minutes) when I got so excited about adding my logo to the home page that I ended up going down a rabbit hole, redesigning my entire website. See, last night, I had a deep conversation with an old friend about a future coding project I have in mind that involves building a Cherokee syllabary keyboard for an interactive game that challenges the user to read a word in English, read the phonetic pronunciation of the word in Cherokee, then attempt to spell the word with the keyboard. At the end, there will be a button to reveal the proper spelling so the user can check their work. My friend showed how advanced AI is now at creating complex projects like this, and with a brief description, the AI chatbot created exactly what I envisioned. In fact, the chatbot’s creation was even more advanced than my version, and it included ascending levels of difficulty and a lexicon of randomly generated words to spell. I felt crushed by this and began to rethink what it really means to be a front-end developer.

My friend (a professional developer) explained that the industry has changed, but that’s not a bad thing. It means we are less caught up in building a few ever-evolving projects per year and are now focused on implementing a variety of meaningful projects, marketing them, and getting people to actually use them. He stressed to me the importance of what I am doing in setting out to learn this subject formally. Although my determination to learn and one day build a project of my own was dimished by the ease and immediacy of the chatbot’s creation, my friend reminded me to be patient and stay focused on my goals.

Anyone can use AI to build something, but only a select few can look under the hood and know where the problem lies. The reason I share this story is that it reinforced my desire to educate myself—to internalize these skills fully, and to continue being patient with myself. When I fell off the rails today, it was because I was chasing perfection. I started asking a0.dev and ChatGPT questions, and they were giving me solutions—instant gratification at its finest! Then I realized that if I keep this trajectory, my website will rapidly become unrecognizable from where it is now: I will have a completely new layout and CSS (that was entirely written for me), and I wouldn’t have learned a thing. That was when I stopped, took my foot off the gas, and reminded myself to trust the process. I may not have the website of my dreams right now, but I do have something entirely built by me. And that’s something I should be proud of. And the best part is, it works! Frontend Frequencies has everything I need (for now), and I will learn, in time, to improve it.

All great things take time. Whether you’re breathing life into a new project or overcoming grief from a personal loss, time and patience are the key ingredients. And wouldn’t you know it? The Gods of Responsive Web Design rewarded me in my patience by showing me a sign today…

One thing that really bothered me yesterday was the hyperlink on my About page (which leads to my personal website). Whenever I clicked it, it kept me in the same tab, instead of opening the URL in a new tab. With patience being my mantra, I decided to give it a rest. Rather than fighting with it or looking for alternative ways to fix the URL destination, I just accepted that I don’t know the answer right now and that, in time, my class will teach me how to resolve this. Then today, one of the first things I learned was the attribute target"_blank". When used in a command, it looks like this.

<a href="URL" target="_blank">your text here</a>

So, the one thing I almost lost sleep over turned out to be the very thing I learned to resolve today. All I needed was a little patience.

To close things out, here’s my favorite thing I learned today: how to embed an image. For this example, I’ll use a picture of a robotic car that my nephew and I built last Christmas. It was a proud day for both of us — the car took seven hours to assemble, had hundreds of tiny pieces, and even included a solar-powered motor (which we also made!). Talk about time and patience… and a little bit of love, too.

The code looks like this: <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frontendfrequencies/Home/main/assets/robot-car.jpg)" alt="Robot Car" />

Here is the rendered output: Robot Car

End of entry — Walks Tall

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