Today, I watched a tutorial on how to use GIMP. Like all the other digital art progams, it can make digital drawings, vector graphics, etc. However, compared to Inkscape, GIMP is used mainly for editing and touching up photos whereas Inkscape is used mainly for digital drawings. Both of these are used to create graphic designs but they have their own little differences. GIMP has all the basic tools like fill, select, shapes, align, rotate, and many more. GIMP can be used to create different types of texts like sliced text, shattered text, denim text, glitch text, and so many more. GIMP has the gradient tool to do more types of coloring and the pencil and brush tool if you need to draw or add something.
Today, I watched more beginners guides on vector graphics in Inkscape. You can create several different types of drawings that can be used in many situations. For example, you can draw an iPhone using Inkscape to use as visuals in a PowerPoint presentation or in a situation similar to that. Many of these logos involve texts on ribbons are a good way to add designs to texts that woud otherwise be plain, such as for an advertisement flyer. Other designs like a simple flame icon, envelope, donut, etc are clean graphics for decoration for things like a website. There are many other drawings that you can make in Inkscape with the tools available for whatever purposes you need it for.
Today, I am watching a beginners guide playlist on Inkscape. Most of the videos today showed how to create differen types of logos or icons using Inkscape. Some examples were a simple box, folder, water droplet, different types of spheres, bicycles, coins, batteries, and so much more. All of these drawings require using many aspects of the tools integrated in Inkscape, such as changing the stroke width, using union and group, copy and pasting, aligning objects, fill tool, duplicate, and etc. These are all simple graphics that you can create and use for other projects that you might have. Such as using these as a banner for certain social media accounts, making a company logo, creating profile pictures, products, and many more.
Today, I finished watching the playlist on the fundamentals of Inkscape and started the beginners guide for Inkscape. Inkscape was updated to version 1.0 sometime in the past and it added a lot of new features to the program. One of the biggest ones was the live path effects. This allowed you to modify the path of a stroke or even a drawing of something. Some examples are creating a pattern along a path, which is the repetition of the same pattern along the path of the object. You can curve texts on paths to create texts that wrap around an arc, convert texts to paths so the letters themselves are paths that can take on live path effects. Like a lot of other programs, Inkscape also allows you to upload images, then crop them, or even trace a picture to create a silhouette of that picture over an image. There are many types of live path effects that you can choose from to make your graphic designs more appealing or complex.
Today, I watched more videos on Inkscape and how to further use it. You can use Inkscape to open Adobe Illustrator so you can work with people who might be using different programs to create their vector arts. Inkscape can be used to create concepts arts of t-shirts, cards, books or custom card games, dice, etc. You can create 2D animation within Inkscape or glassy buttons to add to a piece of art or graphic. Inkscape has so many different features, such as allowing you to create barcodes or QR codes, custom SVG maps, real world maps with vector overlays, changing the exporting file DPI and size. You can turn photos that you have into low poly art with the tools in Inkscape and draw all kinds of different things, whether it's trees, fruits, backgrounds, or cartoon characters.
Today, I watched guides that taught me how to use Corel Painter and Inkscape. Corel Painter is a paid application for digital art and it has many features such as different types of brushes, color palettes, layers, and much more. Inkscape on the other hand is a free program that you can use for digital art. You can see it as a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. The two of them share a lot of the same features, such as the shape tool, fill tool, stroke settings, grouping drawings, and select tool. Inkscape also allows you to import and export PNGs, add texts and assign fonts to those texts, a beizer tool that lets you draw curves and trace existing images. I am still barely through the Inkscape tutorial playlist and there is still a lot more to learn.
Today, I watched a beginner's tutorial on how to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Both of these programs are extremely helpful and not too complicated to use. Adobe Illustrator gives you many tools that allow you to create digital art, such as the shapes tool, fill, colors, drawing with a stylus or mouse, and so on. There are many options for you to edit what you have drawn to your liking such as changing the thickness of your lines, making them dotted, copy and pasting, and so much more. Adobe Photoshop lets you edit photos and add special effects that you otherwise cannot do on a phone or camera. You can edit and touch up the photo or add things to the picture that were otherwise not there or remove parts of the image to completely change it.
Today, I read about how anyone can create and product their own crafts, whether it's art, 3D modeling, building, etc. As long as you can learn these skills, you will be able to do it. However, it will require a lot of effort and dedication for these skills to start selling. You need to start by brainstorming ideas and asking yourself questions about the product. What is it that people buy, want, and talk a lot about? What is currently trending and would benefit from your creations? Then you have to find where and how you will sell these products. First, envision your final product by writing a description of it with a visual image of how you want it to look like and then get the necessary materials required to make it. Then you search for the resources required to learn the skills needed and budget. I took a look into digital art and there are multiple ways to create digital art. Some methods are computer-based sketching, drawing and painting on a tablet, photoshopping images, and etc. One downside is that customers will only pay so much for digital art and it might become hard to sell if you don't meet their requirements as standards will be different from customer to customer. You can also print digital art and ship them to your customers, which could mark up the price of your product depending on the quality, size, detail, and material.
Today, I watched multiple videos that explained to me how a business gets started. Businesses need an executive summary to show almost everyone, whether it's employees, workers, investors, customers, etc. A business plan includes the executive summary, company background, product or service overview, unique product advantage and competitive advantage, the marketplace, operations, leader and management profiles, professional support, risks and threats assessment, financial forecast and key assessments, and relevant appendices. This will tell people what the business's goals are and how they will achieve these goals. There are many types of companies for your business for you to establish. They can be sole proprietortyship, general company, limited liability company, c-corp, b-corp, nonprofit, llc, etc. Each come with their own perks, such as whose liability it is when the company gets sued or what kind of protection the owners or employees get. Branding is super important to get other people to know your business and to get your company out there. Some examples include a domain name, company email, slogan, mission statement, company logo, letterhead, business cards, websites, etc.
Today, I watched videos on what a profit model is and why it is important for any business to be successful. I also learned the importance of understanding a market and its customers to see whether or not your business is doing well. There are many types of profit models, which is just a plan that aims to make the business profitable and viable. For example, production model, which is the creation of a a product or service for sale or the advertising model, commission model, etc. It's the way a company can make revenue. There are components to these models, which is the process and operation that is needed to create such products or services. The cost of production also needs to be taken into account to determine whether or not you will be operating at a loss or a profit. The method of advertising and marketing the product or service is also important as it will attract customers or direct traffic to your goods. Lastly, how the customers will receive what they purchased because they need to get what they paid for. Understanding the market and the customers will help you determine what models you should adopt and how you can outperform other competitors, directly or indirectly. You need to find out what the customers need and want and whether what you are buying are worth their money. The business needs to display their value proposition to the market. In addition to all of this, not all businesses will run smoothly so there needs to be a contingency plan incase something goes wrong. Some examples are IPOs, strategic aquisition, managment buyouts, or changing the profit model and business practices.
Today, I watched videos on what a successful business model looks like and how an entreprenuer should act. An entreprenuer needs to have both hard skills and soft skills. These skills will help them in their respective industry and help them communicate and collaborate with other people. Every entrepreuner needs to be able to communicate, sell anything and everything, be focused, have the ability to learn, and have a business strategy. These are super important as they help you figure out what your business idea will be and who you're going to be doing business with. When starting out, it is important to have a small team of people working with you, when there's too many people, it becomes very difficult. Always have a contingency plan and make sure you that you calculate how much cost is needed for your business startup. It will help you keep on track and make sure things are going the right way. Always share your idea with other people in the industry, they will tell you whether or not your idea is a good business. If it's not a good business, scrap it and start over. It is better to fail early than later becuase you will understand what went wrong and grow from it.
Today, I moved on from the web development topic and started watching some videos on what entrepreneurship is. A lot of the video talk about translating passion, teamwork, determinism, and respect into success. Many of them say that it is hard to continue doing something if you don't like it. If you lose interest in wha you were working on, you will start giving up and that would have been a waste of time. So it is important to find something you genuinely enjoy. In addition, it is important to have other people work with you. You don't have to work alone in this world. It is always much more efficient and easier when you have other people helping you. Finally, being respectful to the people you're working with is vital to how your business will run. If you leave a good impresson on other people, it is more likely for you to have returning customers or attract new customers because of hospitality.
Today, I finished the python beginner video and I was able to make a website with Django. It was very complicated to simply include some text and style as compared to just using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But Django has a very neat admin panel part of the website that lets you add a category of items with listed properties by simply inputting their details. Other than that I don't think I would be using python to make a website since JavaScript is more simpler for web development. I prefer python for creating programs. Java is another programming language and it's different from both python and JavaScript in the sense that Java can be ran on multiple devices with ease. Java, like other languages, also have similar concepts such as logical operators, functions, for loops, and etc. But Java code seems to be a bit more complicated and more lengthy as compared to python. For me, I think I'm going to stick with using JavaScript frameworks to create websites. In addition to all of this, I learned a bit about trying to find a job as a developer. I found out that you need to be honest with your skills and ask for a potential other position when applying for a job if you don't qualify for it. It will be difficult to find a job so it's best to apply to many jobs at once.
Today, I am continuing the full course python beginner guide video and I learned more core concepts, such as functions, classes, constructors, and etc. These will allow me to make more advanced and sophisticated programs. I learned how to import other python files into another one so I can use all the code from one for another. This helps clean up code and make it less messy and allow for reusability. PyCharm is the text editor I'm using for python and you can download outside python packages that other programmers have published to assist you. One example was openpxyl, which is a python package that includes modules and code that allow you to modify and deal with a lot of data in excel much easier. Django is a python framework that lets you build a website and it has many options that can assist you in making one, such as automatically including an admins panel, which can open new options.
Today, I am watching a full course python beginner guide video. It taught me a lot of the basics of python, such as the data types, variables, built in methods and etc. Like many other programming languages, python is used to build programs and softwares or can be used to create applications. Python's logical operators and loops are much more concise and less crowded with code and are easier to work with. Compared to other languages, python's code is very short and simple and it makes it very easy to understand and execute. There are many built in features in python that allow you to create programs that can mutate or organize the lists of data that you have. This is the first time I've used python to create programs and I am slowly learning more about it. I can find many similarities between python and other languages but each of these languages are still unique in their own ways.
Today, I watched a video that teaches you how to write in the PHP programming language. PHP is a backend programming language and it allows you to modify and change the HTML on a web page. It has many different things that allow you play around with this. For example, you can display an array as a HTML or you can modify certain aspects of each element in the array and then display that. You can use PHP to identify what variables are set as what given conditions and PHP can make decisions using if and else statements as well. PHP is very useful for creating dynamic web pages and this is the programming language that WordPress uses. PHP can add text to the page directly or it can add the text using HTML tags. This makes it very useful to edit HTML. Like other languages, PHP has some similar fundamentals, such as declaring variables, arrays, for loops, etc.
Today, I was watching videos that explained to me what it's like to be a web designer and how you're supposed to look for jobs. A lot of these videos emphasized the importance of putting yourself out there and opening up opportunities for yourself. They talked about having a portfolio shows them what you're worth and how you can be a big asset to employers and companies. They showed how you can freelance and find jobs yourself by contacting random stores, like local restaurants, grocery stores, markets, etc. The next series talked about Google Analytics, how to install them and how to use it. Google Analytics is very helpful to track the traffic and usage of your website to see if things are going the correct way. It is an important plugin that can help you cater your website towards the right audience. JavaScript is a programming language that is the most widely used for the frontend part of websites. JS helps make websites much more interactive and responsive. By allowing you to declare variables and conditions, you can use functions, which would include some sort of action, usually modifying these variables or conditions. NodeJS is not a programming but rather it lets JavaScript run outside of the web browser. NodeJS is widely used because it is fast and uses less lines of code.
Today, I finished up the long video on designing databases. In a database, there are primary keys and these are unique, never changing and never null. A primary key can be a natural key, which is just using the data from the table itself, or a surrogate key is a unique number. Foreign keys are references that connect information from table to table in a database. These values can change and are important for referential integrity. In a table, if it is characterized by not null, every single row must have a value. With a foreign key, there are constraints, for example, if the parent value changes, what will happen to the children value? There are different conditions such as on delete, on update, restrict, cascade, and set null. Each of these all do a different thing and all of them ultimately changes the child value based on how the parent value is changed. A simple key has 1 column, whereas a composite key has 2 or more columns. A compound key ahs multiple columns but they're all keys themselves. Cardinality is the relationship type between the row of one table to a row or rows of another table. In data normalization, there is 1NF, 2NF, and 3NF. Each of these all deal with a different issue. Indexes tell you where a certain data point is and there are different types of index. Such as clustered index, which there can only exist one, because it is organized in one certain way. Nonclustered indexes are just a list of reference that you can use to point to data points and they can be organized in any way.
Today, I'm watching a long video (that I haven't finished yet) about designing databases. In a relational database, it basically means that the data is related to each other and there's meaning to this combination. In a database, an entity is anything we store data about, an attribute is the thing we store about that entity. Then there's types of entity or attributes that might share similarities. A relational database management system does stuff with the data that is stored, whether it be changing it, adding or deleting stuff. In addition to all of this, data integrity is also important because sometimes there can be repeated information and it might be confusing which one relates to the other one. As a result, adding something like a primary key will allow easy identification of the data. There are also different types of relationships in databases, for example, one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
Today, I watched a video on how WordPress can be used to create a website without doing any code. This is helpful for anyone who doesn't know how to code a website and there are free options using WordPress. WordPress offers many tools that, such as changing the theme, color, and more, to help design your website. Databases are a collection of the data that is stored and can be accessed on the internet. There are differently types of databases, notably, SQL and NoSQL. SQL stores data in a table, with columns and rows, but NoSQL stores data in documents. Both of these have their own uses, for example, MongoDB is one the most popular NoSQL programs to organize certain data.
Today, I learned about how a website functions and what causes it to become what it is. A website is just a like a location in the street where you need an address to access it. We use the domain name to access websites because memorizing the numbers to the IP address will be a lot more difficult. Between a web server and a web browser, there is something known as a SSL, which safeguards information that is sent between them. When working on a project, SVNs can be very helpful as it allows you keep track of all the edits and the history of the project you're working on. So incase something goes wrong, you can access the older files and figure out what is causing this problem. Then there's Git, which is like SVNs where it keeps track of all your updates, called commits, in a repository on GitHub. Using Git, you can create branches from your master branch, which allows you work on the project without changing the actual deployment of your project and it is very helpful for developing new things before releasing it. WordPress is one option you can use to create a website and there are many tools that it has to assist you in creating a website.
Today, I watched multiple videos that described what the work setting in a remote job looks like. You work from home and hop on meetings through online meetings using applications such as Zoom. There, you are have a camera pointing at you that shows your face to all the other people part of the meeting and you can talk to people. There are many important things to take into account during a remote job. These include things such as internet, a computer to run programs, your background, your appearance, the microphone or camera, etc. Maintaining social interaction in a remote job is difficult because it's only you or your roommates in this setting as opposed to being around your coworkers in person. But still, there are many ways to interact with them using online programs. Maintaining a healthy schedule is important during remote jobs since there are many more distractions.
I learned how to spot and discover scams. Scams are usually offers that are too good to be true or deceitful and malevolent. These offers usually ask for your private information to sign up for a "great" deal or payment for something that you've never bought or asked for.
I learned about all the different types of job roles in web development. These include frontend and backend developers, web designers, web developers, web and data architects, system administrators, and many more. These jobs play a huge role in how every website works, whether it's the artsy or design of the website to whether or not the website responds to clicks and refreshes. Hosting a website itself is pretty simple using resources like Netlify. It is a website that lets you host your own website given you have the code for it and with GitHub, you can update it in real time by simply updating your GitHub repository and Netlify will make the appropriate changes.
Today, I watched many videos on the process of finding a job. I learned a lot about how I should be searching for jobs and how I should be applying to them. I learned what my resume should look like and what a cover letter is. In addition, I understood the importance of having a proper LinkedIn profile and how that contributes to your likeliness of finding a job. Talking about jobs, there are remote jobs. I learned about their advantages and their disadvantages. Those include internet access, location even though the job is remote, motivation, etc. During a job interview, I learned that I should actively listen to what the interviewer is saying and be prepared to answer all types of questions that they can ask you. I should be doing a ton of prior research before the interview so I know a lot of about the company that I am applying to. The clothing that I should wear, even if the interview is remote, is formal attire and I need to appear presentable. Also, during the interview, I need to show the interviewer something that they can gain from hiring me over other people.
Today, I watched multiple videos on how to improve my life and myself. Financially, there are multiple ways where I can secure myself and make sure that I don't spend money recklessly such as budgeting, saving, removing unnecessary spending, etc. I realized how much time I can save everyday by simply cutting out some sort of unproductive work, like watching television or scrolling through social media. In addition, a planner or schedule can help you become so much more productive and not waste as much time procrastinating. Physically and mentally, it is important to be healthy for both of them. Exercise is one thing that can help improve both of those and thinking about things the positive way, engaging in meaningful activities can also help. you mentally. There are many ways to watch out for your health, both physically and mentally. Stress is also one thing you have to watch out for. You can do many things to relieve stress and ways to control the things that make you stressed out. There are people in our lives that we look up to, these are called role models, and then there's people in our lives that take their time to educate us, these are called mentors, and these people can greatly help us improve as a person. Positive role models can guide you what the right things to do and what are successful decisions that you can make. Positive mentors can help educate you greatly and they are there for you. Role models are people that do not know you personally but mentors do.
Today, I watched multiple videos that introduced me to web programming. This included what HTML and CSS are. I learned how to use them to help me create a simple website. HTML is all the content that a website has and CSS is what makes that HTML look good and be presentable in the way I want it to be. There are a lot of ways HTML and CSS can be used together to create many different types of text or content on a website. For example, you can have a simple line of text or you can have a list of text by changing the HTML tag. In addition to all of this, using CSS, you can format these lines of text into bolded or italicized texts or even change the color of the background of the website. We can add images that we can modify their size and position them on the website in the way we want it to. Also, we can make the website responsive by adding media queries so our website can be displayed on other devices correctly.