I Cried After Completing my Nanodegree And It Was Worth It—My Udacity Journey

The Start of the Journey

It’s hard to think that almost a year ago I was applying for a Nanodegree. I was not on the hunt for scholarships or looking to enroll in a bootcamp or nanodegree. I saw the opportunity on social media and almost did not apply. Afterall, I thought, I knew how to code—I had been learning to code for years! I was mostly self-taught but I was employed as an email developer. There were people with similar backgrounds as me who were struggling to find something—anything—in tech. I thought that I didn’t deserve the scholarship and this was before I even applied!

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The One with the Color Picker in Chrome DevTools

I was today years old when I learned that there is a color picker available within Chrome DevTools.

I was making tweaks to the homepage of my website. I use Bootstrap with some custom styling which was making for some weird spacing on larger screen sizes. I was debugging where the extra height was coming from by adding obtrusive background colors to all div elements.

Usually, I inspect an element and double-click it’s hex value in the styles panel to manually make a change. By mistake, I clicked the small color square next to the hex value and—whoa—a wild color picker has appeared!

Example of using Chrome DevTools to change a hex value
An example of using Chrome DevTools to change the hex value of a CSS property value

Pretty cool right?

In playing around with the tool some more, I see that you can use an eyedropper to pick out new colors, toggle the color values from RGA, hex, and hsla and even pick colors from the material design color palette.

This is great news for someone like me who wants needs to debug in the browser or wants to test new colors without opening up a text editor.

Here’s Google’s documentation on the tool and other CSS Reference features.

Chrome DevTools | CSS Reference

The One Where I Did an AMA on Open Source

It’s Fall. The leaves are changing. The weather is getting colder.

Hacktoberfest is coming.

Open source is an exciting thing. It can also be intimidating. I spoke about my open source experiences at Codeland and a lot of attendees had similar stories or questions.

Inspired by the good folks at dev.to, I decided to open myself up to an AMA (ask me anything) on the topic of creating and managing my first open source project.

The AMA can be found here. I’ll also welcome questions via email, my blog or on Twitter.

Stay spooky.

The One About Twitter Tech Chats

I enjoy participating in Twitter Chats.

Sometimes, I forget when my faves are, or, forget to flag new ones to check out later.

So, to help keep them all in one place (and to discover more) I created a Twitter Tech Chat repo on Github with a list of some of the tech-related Twitter chats on my radar.

This repo will evolve over time, but for now, it works.

If there’s a tech chat you regularly tune into that’s not on the list, open a pull request and get it added.

Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash