Announcing Two New Non-Credit Classes at Clark College

I’m happy to announce two new exciting “non-credit” courses that are being offered this Fall through Clark College that I wanted you to know about!

If you have any questions whatsoever, please get in touch with me.

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I Do Not Agree

Going to shit

2015 is when web development went to shit. Web development used to be nice. You could fire up a text editor and start creating JS and CSS files. You can absolutely still do this. That has not changed. So yes, everything I’m about to say can be invalidated by saying that.

Read “The Sad State of Web Development” >

Here’s what I am teaching this winter at Clark College

For the winter quarter I will be teaching the following courses at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington:

  1. CTEC 121: Intro to Programming and Problem Solving (Python) – 5 credits
  2. CTEC 122: HTML Fundamentals (HTML/HTML5/CSS) – 4 credits
  3. CTEC 127: PHP/MySQL 1 – 5 credits

If you are interested in taking any of these classes please let me know.

This is why I teach at Clark College

I just received this message from a graduate of the Clark College Web Development program:

Hey Bruce! Just wanted to say hi and give you an update. I’ve been at my front end developer job for almost three months and I received an awesome 90 day review from my employer (they had nothing bad to say about me and everything is going well). So this career has been pretty awesome for me so far. You really made a difference in my life when you mentored me because I wouldn’t have gotten this far without your guidance.

I am very blessed.

A Complete Guide to Flexbox

The Flexbox Layout (Flexible Box) module (currently a W3C Last Call Working Draft) aims at providing a more efficient way to lay out, align and distribute space among items in a container, even when their size is unknown and/or dynamic (thus the word “flex”).

The main idea behind the flex layout is to give the container the ability to alter its items’ width/height (and order) to best fill the available space (mostly to accommodate to all kind of display devices and screen sizes). A flex container expands items to fill available free space, or shrinks them to prevent overflow.

Most importantly, the flexbox layout is direction-agnostic as opposed to the regular layouts (block which is vertically-based and inline which is horizontally-based). While those work well for pages, they lack flexibility (no pun intended) to support large or complex applications (especially when it comes to orientation changing, resizing, stretching, shrinking, etc.).

CSS Tricks – A Complete Guide to Flexbox >

Where you can find me for the next few months

Here’s my teaching schedule for the Winter Quarter at Clark College:

  • Monday/Wednesday: CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving at Clark College/Washington State University (2-4:20pm/Room 104)
  • Tuesday/Thursday: CTEC 122 – HTML Fundamentals (12-1:50pm/Room SHL 124) and CTEC 127 – PHP with SQL (3:30-5:50pm/Room SHL 124)

My office is SHL 127 located in Scarpelli Hall.

Two Years as a College Professor

This month I completed my second year as a professor at Clark College. In that time I have taught HTML Fundamentals, JavaScript, Intro to Programming and Problem Solving with Python, PHP with SQL 1 and PHP with SQL 2. In that time I have taught 500 students, received the 2013 Exceptional Faculty Award and have made many new friends and colleagues. It seems like just yesterday that I was discussing the opportunity of teaching at Clark with MarkyMark, Matt and Ben. Thanks guys for your guidance and friendship.

My friends Ed and Volker call this my “encore career” and I couldn’t be happier and in a better place than where I am now.

Derek Featherstone: CSS, Accessibility, and You

Here’s a free, hour-long talk that Derek Featherstone recently delivered at the CSS Developer Conference in New Orleans.

When most people think about accessibility, they think about HTML as the foundation for accessibility. It makes perfect sense — strong semantic HTML has a huge impact on a visually impaired person using a screen reader. But, what about people with other disabilities? The truth is, there are many more people with low-vision out there than there are blind. There are more fully-sighted keyboard users in the wild than there are non-sighted keyboard users. And there are a huge number of other disabilities that most people don’t even consider when they build their sites and applications. In order to provide the best of user experience to people of all abilities, we must move beyond “write great HTML and you’ll be accessible.” To do that, we use CSS. In this session, we’ll share with you some of the most significant accessibility challenges we face when it comes to the web today and share with you solutions for addressing those head on with the CSS you write. You’ll learn all about the issues, AND know what to do about them.

Watch the video >