Personal Portfolio Profile_Issues with the NavBar, white space, etc

1

I have been working on my personal portfolio profile and am having difficulty making adjustments to the following features:

  1. removing the underline under the menu items in the navigation bar at the top.
  2. removing the whitespace between the last two sections.
  3. centering the text (and boxes) in the first and last sections so that they stay centered when the window has been resized.

My profile is here: https://codepen.io/ksirgey/pen/OgqjPJ?editors=1100.

Thank you for the help.

2

For the underline, add a text-decoration line to your css for the hover of those links.

.menu-item:hover {
  color: #DEDCC0;
  text-decoration: none;
}

For the centering, you’ll could change the css with auto centering?

.about-me-description {
  font-size: 20px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

With the white space issue, could you be more specific?

I also notice some orphan anchors in your html, for example line 29 or 30. There is an extra </div>. It is very easy to do, but there are a few of those.

Hmmm, applied linguistics, ey? That’s what my wife studied.

3

Oh nice. Is she an ESL instructor? The white space is between the last two sections (Skills and Contact Me).

4

In the white space on the left side, there is a sideways carrot. I would like for my title to stay more or less centered over the background image. When I resize my browser window to make it smaller, the text gets pulled down. When I expand it to fill my screen, it gets pushed up.

5

Just to explain the debugging process, I put borders around your section5 and section6 to see where the problem was:

.section5 {
  background-color: #6c8e7f;
  border: 1px red solid;
}

and…

.section6 {
  border: 1px green solid;
}

I did this to see to whom the whitespace belonged. It belonged to neither. So looked in your HTML at that spot. On line 331 I found a typo:

  </div>><!--End of Skills section-->

There is an extra > in there. That is the “sideways carrot” you are seeing. Once I remove it, the whitespace disappears.

My wife mainly teaches Spanish in elementary school. She grew up in Peru, got her BA in Spanish Literature, got a graduate diploma in translation in Australia, and recently got an MA in applied linguistics. But she’s trying to get back into translating now. We’re both trying to get jobs for which we can get remote work to fulfill out dream of moving to Barcelona. That’s why I’m trying to get back into programming. She’s about to get her Italian passport worked out so the red tape will be worked out and then we just need to figure out how to make a living …

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6

I was able to locate the extra div.

Oh wow. I hear Barcelona has a thriving international scene. Best of luck to both of you. I also have my sights on working remotely as a programmer. From what I can tell, it can be easy to find work once the initial projects are finished and skills refined.

7

Yes, Barcelona is amazing. And she loves Dali and I love Picasso, so that is a slam dunk. Plus the adventure of learning Catalan. It has a thriving jazz scene which would be great for me (jazz guitarist by night, coder by day) and it is a very international city. With a healthy tech scene. And we can buy an apartment there for 1/6 what it costs here.

I don’t know if I’d say it’s easy to find work, but it is a step in the right direction to get your foot in the door of a growing field that seems to be perpetually understaffed. But this is going to be a commitment to lifelong learning. The more you hone your skills the better the jobs and pay.

You’re going to get frustrated. It’s like when you’re climbing a mountain and you think your at the summit but when you get there, you see that there is another peak. If you can imagine that happening over and over again, then that is what this is going to be like. There will always be three or four new libraries/frameworks/languages that you think you need to learn and then you’ll have it figured out. But of course, you will never get there. Never. But you will be building more and more skills as you go and getting stronger and stronger.

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8

Nice. Barcelona sounds awesome with all the opportunities there.

Thank you for the heads up. Do you happen to know the attrition rate among programming students? Do you think the rate will go down now that there is more support available to them (us)? I have heard that the ‘dip’, or difficult road ahead, is coming and would like to estimate my chances of surviving it.

9

I am also interested in how companies generate opportunities and jobs.

10

I don’t really have any hard statistics about attrition rates of students. I imagine that it is pretty high for people starting curricula like this - you get a lot of people with superficial enthusiasm or who think this will be easy and quick. But I imagine it improves as time goes by.

As far as the future, I know that the internet isn’t going away soon. They will always need web developers. There’s increasing competition from auto-generating places like WordPress and Wix. But that will only go so far - some people will always want/need something better or more original. That means either hand coding sites, or customizing auto-generated sites that will require coding skills (JavaScript and php for WordPress).

But I think that it means that the days of someone being a successful web developer by knowing HTML and CSS and being able to cut and past some JavaScript is over. People can easily get that for free. Maybe 10 years ago, having something like the frontend certificate would be a path to a career, but those are dwindling, I think. Now, unless you manage to stake out some space with very creative designs, you are going to need some deeper knowledge.

But FCC is a good path. It leaves you with some great frontend knowledge, gets you familiar with some important libraries, and gets you going on some backend stuff. Is it enough to make you a web developer? That’s debatable. But at least it gets you a good solid foundation and the knowledge to see what you need to work on next. And there are people that have landed great jobs after getting the FCC certificates. I just wouldn’t count on it as a fait accompli.

Just put in the work and learn. Learn to love coding and learn to love learning. If you do that, the job will (eventually) find you.

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