Ready Player One?

As Mario would say, “Let’s a go!”

As my time as a Juno College of Technology student comes to end I was trying to come up with an analogy of how to encapsulate the experience. Ultimately, I decided on something that many of us can relate to — video games.

Now many of you may be thinking, “Calvin, what are are you talking about?”, but hear me out. In most modern video games, the creators are looking to ease the player into the game’s mechanics and concepts. There is usually some kind of tutorial that guides the player down this path; In some cases, this is last for hours of gameplay!

My knowledge of front-end development prior to my initial Juno courses was limited to say the least. You might say I “watched the game trailers”, but had no idea what I was doing. This is where Juno swept in to action; They were the tutorial for front-end development. They have guided us through both theoretical and practical work, slowly ramping up the difficultly as we progress. They would reign you in if your project ideas were a little to grand (ala redesigning Facebook). Finally, they provided us access to the most powerful item in the game (no, not courage), the Google!

That is not to say that the experience hasn’t had glitches at time, like we are learning with the console version of Cyberpunk 2077. However, these hiccups have been relatively minor.

Something I’ve thoroughly enjoyed about this tutorial has been the character creator. While I’ve enjoyed all of the languages that I’ve learned, I have a special love for advanced CSS methods. Think of it as leveling up your character with skill points and choosing how they are allocated.

One of the best parts of a game is creating your character and assigning his attributes.

So as I build my personal website and look through all of the projects over the past 4 months, I see the enormous growth is skill and potential within me. From meager floats, to advanced REST API’s and React Routers, I know I have the skills to be successful once the tutorial has finished. Speaking of which, it looks like the opening credits are finishing up, so check back in a few months to see if I’ve tackled the initial boss, finding my first job within the industry!