Application for Founders & Coders
Hello!
My name is Dominic Simpson and this is my application website for Founders & Coders' Skills Bootcamp.
I grew up not far from Founders & Coders' offices, and have been learning coding on and off for the last ten years. I genuinely enjoy designing websites and learning coding, and am ambitious to be a full-time software developer. I have enjoyed my experience working with other applicants during F&C's meet-ups, both online and in person, and want to take my experience further by enrolling on F&C's Skills Bootcamp, with a view to completing a Software Apprenticeship at the end, for which I am fully comitted. I am ambitous to be a Software Developer full-time. But more than that, I am also able to work as part of a student community, and apply non-judgemental respect and empathy to fellow cohorts.
My love of coding comes from the creativity and experience of continually learning. When I was a kid, I programmed simple computer games on an Amstrad CPC-464, using BASIC language - so with the Theseus & The Minotaur Project, it feels like I've come full circle.
This portfolio contains my work on the six projects that are required as part of the application process, as well as some of my other work. Mouse over each card for the name of the project, and then click each Show Description button twice for a subsequent description, including a link to the project's GitHub repository.
For the first project, I constructed a tribute page to Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller, the legendary American architect, systems theorist, futurist, writer, designer, inventor, and philosopher. Fuller is something of a hero of mine, having overcome the odds to be a true visionary whose ideas are still with us today.
I used Google Fonts to make the headings looks professional and employed Flex Box. I also decided to keep the main section with a white background, because some of the images – particularly the Dymaxion car replica and the Dymaxion map projection of the World – had white edges, and they blended well with each other. There would've been a jarring effect if there had been a physical image border.
Initially, the time and date were at the top, but this did not look quite right, so it put it in the footer section.
The links are in blue for accessibility purposes: blue is generally held up as the best colour to have links in, for those who have sight access requirements.
This project gallery is made up of screenshot cards of each of the six projects that make up the Founders & Coders application. I have used media queries to try and make the cards scale correctly, and at a max-width of 600px, the images stack on top of each other.
For the third project, I constructed a Comment Box, which employed the same logic as when Tweeting: only a maximum of 140 characters allowed.
This meant setting up a system on JavaScript where a constant variable with the number 140 was invoked as comparison when the user started typing in characters. This logic was tricky to comprehend at first given that the counter was counting down from 140 to 0 rather than up, as well as having to account for what would happen to the counter if the user backspaced.
I constructed an if else statement to account for if the user had reached the limit of 140 characters, with not only the text highlighted in red, but also the walls via the outline property in CSS, which I had not encountered before.
Finally, I also constructed a print function, which not only printed out what the user had typed in the textarea field before hitting Submit, but also forced them to fill in the Name field, which was printed out too.
For the fourth project, I constructed a Fruit Shop, with each fruit added to a Cart that displayed on a separate, linked Cart page.
Each fruit item was linked to a specific object in a Products array in the JavaScript, with an inCart element as one the elements in the object that incremented every time.
A function called displayCart printed out the products on the Cart page, generating the items and price, and calculating a basket total.
For this website, which contains a portfolio of my work, I wanted bright, welcoming colours, and settled accordingly on yellow as a background colour, rather than the more forbidding black of my existing website that I've had for the last few years.
I've also seen other websites use Roboto Mono font successfully, so I employed this as a paragraph font.
For my in-depth feature, based around a more substantial, complicated piece of work, I used the Greek legend of Theseus and The Minotaur. I had been thinking for a while about how to represent the Greek legend in a simple game, and how it would work.
Using an online template, which I very much eventually transformed into my own vision, I jotted down some pseudocode and constructed two identical maze levels to represent the Labyrinth after experimenting first with wireframes on Google Sheets. The two levels were there in order to have one Theseus sprite for each. Each Theseus sprite traverses the Labyrinth, via the user's use of keyboard or onscreen buttons, in order to reach the Minotaur at the very centre of the Labyrinth, who Theseus slays. My idea, which I managed to realise after extensive work redesigning the original template, was that the two Theseuses would then be compared to see who reached the Minotaur the quickest. An on-screen statement would state the winner.
The project was complex to realise and took much redesign of coding. I constructed a Game prototype object, something that I wasn't aware of before, which contained all subsequent functions. These included a Start button and Timer, so that each Theseus could be timed. An additional consideration had to be made on each Theseus having an equidistant route to the Minotaur, which influenced the mirrored pattern of the Labyrinth. The process of transforming from the first level to the second was complex, particularly when trying to restart the timer.
Other Work
On my website, I have constructed some animation based on the solar system. This includes all of the planets and some of the main moons. I have used CSS animations to do so, including setting the timing duration at different levels for each planet, so that they rotate around the animated Sun at different speeds.
I completed a Certificate in Continuing Education in Web Developement at Birkbeck College a few years ago, comprising several modules that gave me a good grounding in advanced HTML and basic object-orientated programming concepts and logic. This work collects some of the coursework that I completed for these modules.
This was a previous prompt by Founders & Coders as part of the application process, which involved having a form that prompted the user to enter a sequence of numbers divided by commas. If the user clicked on the Filter button and then clicked Submit, the form would then state which of those buttons were divisible by two.
By contrast, if the user clicked on the Reduce function and then clicked Submit, the form would then state the total of the numbers inputted.
Photos that I have taken around the world and here in the UK (warning: contains Bootstrap frameworks).