Halimah's FAC Application

Halimah says:

Hello, my name is Halimah and my pronouns are they/them.

Halimah says:

Over the past five years, I have worked in children's publishing as an editor. I've lost count of the number of books I've had a part in the journey of and I'm immensely proud of all I've achieved. But I feel ready for something new. I'm now looking to move across from publishing into tech (and who knows, maybe I'll even end up in publishing tech?!).

Halimah says:

As someone who grew up in the hey day of MSN (later Windows Live Messenger) I wanted my first website to harken back to that time as it was key to my experience of the internet as a child. I used to rush home after school to login to MSN and chat to my school friends and play games such as Minesweeper Flags and Brain Battle with them.

Halimah says:

MSN was host to some of my fondest memories of using the internet pre-social media. Because of my nostalgia, I thought it would be a great first project to demonstrate a bit about where I've come from and who I am!

Halimah says:

I hope you enjoy my homage to those early days as part of my application to Founders and Coders.

Halimah says:

As I touch on in my about section, I remember being on the internet from the age of 4, using the likes of MSN, playing games on Miniclip and other now defunct websites. As part of that, I have always been interested in how websites work and perhaps my earliest introduction to this was learning how to build websites using Freewebs (RIP) to create a Lord of the Rings fansite at the age of 8.

Halimah says:

However, despite this longstanding interest - apart from dabbling in the HTML and CSS of Tumblr and Wordpress themes - my previous attempts to teach myself how to code lacked focus and so I struggled to keep up the momentum. Through FAC, I have discovered a renewed interest in coding. The prerequisites have helped me focus my learning to establish the foundations that I hope will lead to a long career in software development.

Halimah says:

Beyond my general fascination with how websites work, I have always enjoyed puzzles and logic (my favourite combination of course being logic puzzles - shout out Murdle!). And this, along with my experience as an editor and eye for detail feel like key skills and interests I can apply to the world of coding.

Halimah says:

Finally, as I've been working from FAC's requirements, I have found myself feeling really excited about the endless possibilities for what I can learn and apply to improve my website. Even in making this website, I've had countless ideas - some of which I probably won't be able to implement due to current lack of knowledge or time - and I can't wait to come back to this website in a year or so and see all the ways I can improve this further.

Halimah says:

As I worked on freeCodeCamp's responsive web design course, I had to create a survey form. You can find it here.

Halimah says:

As I built on my Javascript knowledge, I followed this YouTube tutorial on DOM and created a Gender Neutral Terms Generator with the help of YourDictionary's list of terms. You can find the generator here.

Halimah says:

As part of my application to the next FAC cohort, I created a role-playing game. You can find and play it here.

Halimah says:

I was inspired by the likes of Tamagotchi and a game I played as an early teen called Howrse, which involved taking care of a pet/horses, respectively. Although this is a much simpler rendition of those games, I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!