(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr)

“I’d fallen seriously behind,” B.J. Baye says.

The Treehouse student had taken a web design course in college as part of an interactive multimedia program. But aside from a WordPress blog, he last built a website in 2001 — a “Dark Age of Camelot” fan site. Then he stopped.

More than a decade later, Baye, a 35-year-old author and publisher in Orillia, Ontario, figured the time to sharpen his skills had arrived. He signed up for Treehouse and “kind of lazily worked [his] way” through the first project but didn’t get too far.

Fast-forward to last week. Baye dove into Treehouse’s web design track, started learning CSS and found the experience more educational and enjoyable than before.

Baye

“What I enjoyed the most, however, was learning about responsive web design,” he says. ”It’s not something I’d ever really considered, and it’s amazing how some very simple changes can make sites work well on any size screen. Until now, I’d always thought of ‘mobile versions’ being completely separate designs from the desktop versions.”

The Treehouse courses changed how he thinks about design.

“I’m very much looking forward to what else I might learn as I continue deeper into the Track,” Baye says.

He is one of dozens of Treehouse students who shared with us — via Facebook, Twitter and our blog — what they learned at Treehouse this week. Here are some lightly edited and excerpted submissions:

Learning what we prod at but never really grasp

“I’ve been ‘making websites’ for at least a decade, but never had any formal training. Having recently decided to monetise my technical ability in other ways outside my job as an Oracle consultant, I decided to sign up for Treehouse, and start from the beginning,” Chris Godfrey says.

“So much of what I thought I knew was lacking in context and detail! I have found Nick’s videos to be very well made and clear. But to answer the question, probably the biggest thing for me this week was learning about CSS layouts, the difference between margin, padding, how floats work, all stuff that I’d prodded at before but never really grasped. Really enjoying the course so far and looking forward to seeing where it takes me next.”

What we learned at Treehouse this week, via Twitter:

On Facebook, we asked you to fill in the blank: “I learned ___________ with Treehouse this week.” And you told us:

Android and it was awesome — Tasfaout Yassine

JQUERY methods that will help me add form fields and comments to my website — Tom Schinler

Basics of HTML and CSS — Zach Taylor

PHP and MySQL — Rogelio Delgado

I learned Objective-c Basics with Treehouse this week. — Hassan Boulhilt

WordPress Development and CSS Layout Techniques — Alexandra Moss

Web typography and CSS gradients — Chester Rageagainstsociety Burnett

I am learning how to design a mobile website using the new how to design a website lessons. — Ismail Qaznili

Just completed the CSS Animation track, been putting that off for a while because I wasn’t planning on using animations. Now back to Sass… lets see if I can get it working this time around. — Peter O’Brien

How to start my freelancing business. Next is responsive web design and other things that’ll take me to the next level. — Stefani Lefler

The post What We Learned at Treehouse This Week: CSS, Objective-C, Starting a Business and More appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Making of Myths
A software developer discusses how fallacies in his field form and ossify, and how that limits our imagination of what software can do.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor

We’re hiring! We’re looking for great Animator/Motion Designers, Graphic Designers, and Office Assistants.

Think you’ve got what it takes to work at commonvision & iNet? Apply to find out! We will be accepting applications until April 4th.

http://commonvision.umbc.edu/hireme

Quite the in-depth exploration of underlined text on the web by Marcin Wichary.

In the end, linear-gradient won the day with the most control, best look, and best performance. Some people have been playing with it on CodePen.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Crafting link underlines on Medium is a post from CSS-Tricks

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About 22,000 CSS-Tricks visitors voted in the last poll about command line usage, which asked:

On average, how many commands do you run from the command line each work day?

The result: there is a lot of people at all the different levels. It's no wonder it can be such a hot topic.

Here's the results as a chart:

See the Pen uJjyD by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

19% of people never use the command line at all. The largest group, 27%, only run a handful of commands a day.

18% run 10-50 commands, 15% run 50-100 commands, and 15% run 100-1000 commands. I think it's interesting that this group, taken together (10-1000 commands a day) represent the largest number of people (48%).

The smallest group (6%) run over 1000 commands a day. Some people just live in the shell!

Personally, I'm in the 10-50 group. I'm typically doing things like firing up Grunt, starting a Rails server, and related things to get a dev environment set up.

The idea for the poll was based on the common side-conversation that always seems to accompany conversations about command line tools.

Say a new tool comes out that can only be used through the command line. Whatever it does, the end result is desirable. Some folks will be excited and be talking about it and using it. Some folks will think about using it but never get around to it because it's a bit out of the comfort zone. Some people will bemoan the fact it's a command line tool and write it off completely.

Then there will be some comments lambasting the non command line users. Some comments telling them there is nothing to be afraid of. It's easy to agree with that, since of course learning more is always a good idea. But on the other hand, not everybody needs to know everything and there is some tools that, however nerdy, could benefit from a UI. Tools like CodeKit are proof they are desired and highly used.

I suspect tools like Grunt are both:

1. Getting more people into the command line
2. Making the command line less difficult
3. Giving more bang-for-the-buck for learning it

If a new command line tool comes out these days that does something cool, chances are it already is a Grunt plugin or someone will make it one in short order. So now you don't have to learn something new, you just include the Grunt plugin and configure it, which you've probably already done a number of times.

I'm also of the opinion there probably will never be a GUI for Grunt - at least not one that is any good - because what matters in Grunt is the configuration of plugins. Each plugin is so different it would require it's own special UI unique to it, not something generic.

The most interesting bit I've learned here is how broad the spectrum is in command line usage, ranging all the way from zero experience to mastery. That's much different that most things we discuss in web tech, so it's good to keep in mind.

New poll soon.

Poll Results: Command Line Usage is a post from CSS-Tricks