Notes from January

🚧 Building the new Common Knowledge website. ✍️ Writing a project report for my apprenticeship. 📝 Writing technical notes each week of the project.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

What I’ve been working on

This month has been dedicated to my final project for my apprenticeship - a rebuild of the Common Knowledge website. Working from designs created in Figma (by our co-op designer Gemma) I have created a CMS in the Django based framework Wagtail. I have also built custom HTML templates and a CSS theme with Tailwind. I’ve written notes from each week of the project summarizing my main learnings which can be viewed here.

What I’ve been learning

This month I've been learning how to:

• build custom Page models and StreamField blocks with Django and Wagtail
• write database queries with the Django ORM
• write end-to-end tests with Cypress and unit tests with Pytest
• use the Stimulus JavaScript framework with Django
• use the Flowbite library for UI components
• set up a staging site on Fly.io

What’s next

In February I’ll be moving onto other project work with Common Knowledge. I’ll also be attending two interviews with the apprenticeship assessors.

Interesting links

These are some interesting links that I’ve come across this month:

• Quincy Larson, the Founder of Free Code Camp, has published a book-length guide to learning to code for free
• The 2022 State of JS survey identifies upcoming trends in web development to help developers make technical choices
• Generate fluid typography code snippets using the CSS clamp function with this app
• The Web Development Reading List curates the best and latest articles on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP