Dev 101: The Edenspiekermann Cookbook

At the last Maker Days, our developer Hugo Giraudel held a workshop teaching the basics of coding to members of the Edenspiekermann team. The rules? Come ready to learn, and armed with your favorite recipe. The result? The Edenspiekermann Cookbook!

Here, Hugo gives us a round-up of the workshop, and you can read the full-length article on his blog.

Ironically, when it comes to teaching HTML and CSS, I don’t like to work on websites. When teaching the basics of frontend development, I like to work with recipes. It’s enough to learn about HTML without feeling overwhelmed, and more than enough to experiment with CSS for hours.

I asked every participant to prepare a recipe and an image. Over the two days, everyone worked on their own recipe and design, and I then gathered them all into a small website that we named the “ESPI Cookbook”.

The workshop kicked off with a 15 minute introduction: how a website works, what frontend development is (and de facto what backend is as well), the two essential languages that compose it (no, none of them are JavaScript) and what we wanted to build in the two days.

I then started by introducing HTML, and how to write it. Opening a tag, adding some content, closing a tag. Easy peasy. It took a bit of time for some participants to understand where to close tags, but eventually everyone got there.

The second half of the day started with an introduction to CSS. After a few explanations, we actually created a stylesheet and used the tag to connect it to the HTML document. Everyone started applying styles to their pages; first the main title, then the sub-titles, then the paragraphs, the lists, and so on. I was actually surprised at how fast everyone managed to get this and style their document.

In the end, all participants seemed pleased with what they came up with in just a few hours. On my side, I am super happy with the workshop. It was such a great teaching experience that I cannot wait to do it again.

You can take a look at the ESPI Cookbook here.

We enjoyed Hugo’s workshop so much, that we’re planning to hold a second one for the team members who couldn’t take part during the Maker Days. Thanks Hugo!