Breakingb0x3s a Dev

This section is about me.

Hello, my name is Riley Robinson. I am a developer who is continuing my journey into programming. One aspect that has lead me to this journey is boxing. Growing up I always admired fighters and their ability to take in information and adjust to their opponent on the fly. You cannot be successful if you can't learn. And one thing that my attempts at boxing have taught me, is that learning takes time. Even the amazing on the fly adjustments, are learned weeks to months prior to the actual fight. Another aspect that plays into my coding is my love of games. It's not just sports, but videogames as well that inspire me. It's fun to breakdown the inner workings of a game, understanding the rules, making adjustments for a more interesting experience, all of this I can also get from coding.

Artwork

Developer Projects

Updates

5/31/23 - Told you I'd update more often. Still annoying to do so because this is manually adjusted in the HTML. Anyway, finished my update the Alphabet app, it will now have a selection between all lower case and all upper case. I stumbled a bit setting it up at first but it's working now. The app will also reset after all letter's have been correctly identified by the user/student however it still pulls up an undefined value after the last letter and you have to press the 'Got it' button again. I think I can build a check for that to avoid having to do that but I'm satisfied with where it is at now.

5/29/23 - Well, so much for updating more often lol. I have been in a depression, preparing to move up north from AZ to MN and it is daunting. I'd go into everything that has been going on but I just want to address my feelings towards coding. I lost a lot of confidence with the artificial intelligence news lately, it's one of those things where if I were further along with my understanding I'd definetly not have worried like I did, but it did impact me. Everything else that has been going on has impacted me as well, but the idea that a program made by someone else could code better than me sucks to face. But, despite not yet updating this section to be updated easier, I actually started coding today. Took me over 3 hours to figure out how to apply a function to an entire class. Stupid. But it was great when I solved it and even if I had solved it in 30 minutes, I would have still enjoyed it. Puzzle solving, that's why I love this. Making something work as intended? Yes! I'm going to be doing this a lot more and with a bit of work, I'm sure this will pay off. Even though this update won't post on the date I'm typing it, wow, this has been a ride.

3/13/23 - So been a little while since I've updated. This is becoming a coding journal for me so I'll try to update this section more often, it'll be good for my mental health. Been struggling to stay consistent with my coding, working two jobs (totaling between 60 and 70 hours a week) on top of being a parent is exhausting at times. Plus I'm feeling more and more burnt out. I will be relived when I can make THIS a job. On a much more positive note, I was able to make a small functional app this past Saturday for the girls, it's just a simple project that generates a random number of dots for the girls to practice counting. It was pretty easy, except I ran into a problem making clones of nodes, I did not realize that JS avoids making clones (probably to avoid infinite loops) so I had to set an attribute to allow for that to occur. Figured I'd provide a knowledge update.

2/11/23 - CSS is a lot more fun to do when you're focusing on just minor updates as opposed to mapping out the main design, it at least feels less stressful. I've even gone back to the Alphabet Flashcard project and updated it's CSS for mobile view. I'll eventually have to do the same for the Math Quiz app, but I currently have more use for the flashcards. I also have another project to go back and play around with some more css animations.

2/7/23 - So I usually dread doing responsive adjustments for screen size, but this one formed pretty well. I've also decided to use this card as a contact page as well. Should be pretty easy to do, I'll list my email and linked in to it as well as an image or gif of Gudetama. *Post doing that stuff* Still cannot get the hover feature I want to work on the Development project links. Anyway, I added the contact page and adjusted the cards a little bit. Not much else to report atm.

2/1/23 - Finally dug in and made an honest attempt at styling my Portfolio. It's hard to admit (and this could just be due to my inexperience with CSS), but I may consider being a full Stack Developer instead of just a Front End Developer, I enjoy making the functionality of the sites and projects work. I do enjoy getting the styling right and think I am getting a lot better at it (having this portfolio switch views has done alot) but it makes me excited to get back to the javascript. I'll be attempting to use React or Svelt after I've increased my understanding of the fundamentals I've learned so far.

1/25/23 - So made quite a bit of progress, still need to finish the functionality of the aboutMe and Projects pages (aboutMe will be easy just a couple of things to include video links and embed them in the sideDisplay when clicked) I'm having second thoughts about the update card, I think I want to make it an actual field where users can read my updates, but I can personally write and update the page from the same page. This may require some backend work that while I don't know the details yet, I'll do some digging, but in regards to this portfolio I think I will just occassionally provide manually updated html updates until I can figure out the backend.

1/16/23 - Okay got frustrated trying to get the cards to have their own dropdowns with just CSS, but it may be do to how I'm implementing the hover effect. If need be, I'll fall back to JS for the menus to appear as needed. I've decided to have the update card show the dates of the 3 most recent updates to the portfolio and when clicked on it will update the aboutMe section with a list of update dates and when clicked on the full update (like this one) will be displayed on the display.