Introduction:
Hey! I'm Jeff and I'm so excited to be leading the mentor circles this spring quarter. I'm a student here at the University of Washington looking to either study CS or Mechanical engineering. This is my second time TAing for this class after taking the class in SP18. I started messing around with web development in high school when I was in charge of a newsletter. Here's the first one I ever made. If you inspect the code you can see that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but through this course I learned the ins and outs of web development and so can you!
Tips and Tricks
Hopefully, you can see that there is a lot of cool stuff we're going to learn in this class! But don't worry, whether you're a bootstrap expert or you've never heard of an HTML tag before, this class can set you up to succeed. I honestly learned more in CSE 154 than I did in the 2 years I tried to teach myself. If you want to get the most out of this class, I would:
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Put work into your Creative projects
You will learn the most when you program something you want to build, on your own time. The creative projects are tailored for you to have the room to experiment with concepts you find interesting! Make it your own and make sure to have fun!
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Take Note of Resources That are Mentioned
One of the beautiful things about web development is that you can learn all about it on the web! There are hundreds of resources including tools, instructional videos, plug-ins, and so much more that can be really helpful for learning and practicing concepts. I'll try to point out resources periodically throughout the class that I think would be helpful for you all, but try asking your peers what they use as the class goes on!
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Make Time For Your Homework
This is an obvious one, but it can't be said enough.
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Don't Be Afraid To Ask For Help
Between office hours and WPL hours, there are a lot of opportunities to get help when you're stuck. And it's OKAY to be stuck! I had to ask a lot of questions to get from my first HTML document to here. We're all here to teach so don't worry!
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Lectures
These lectures will include many resources, examples, and info that will guide you through the course. So, make sure to come to lecture and pay attention!
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Homework
Read the spec sheet, read the spec sheet, read the spec sheet! That is the #1 thing you can do to do well on homework. I lost lots of points as a student just because I lazily read the first few spec sheets and missed points that were easy to get.
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Tests
Practice It! and Code Step By Step are your best friends. Nothing will teach you to write code better than writing code. Plan ahead so you have time to sit down and do as many problems BY HAND as you can. Practicing with your keyboard will only get you so far.
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Overall
It's going to be a great quarter and I look forward to teaching all of you!