Week 2

Getting set up on GitHub

I’ve built quite a few websites in the past, but I’ve never used GitHub. Should have. Would have helped a lot. Time to rectify that.

Here’s my profile: https://github.com/hjludwig

Starting a simple tax calculator

It’s time to get started with building something real world to get a handle on writing some working javascript and getting used to the GitHub workflow as well as my new code editor of choice, Visual Studio Code.

Every tax season my wife and I have to remember how to calculate the tax we would have paid on a total after tax amount. It’s a simple calculation, but it always takes a minute to remember what it is and it’s a bit of a pain to type in a calculator manually over and over again.

This year when we did our taxes, I made a simple spreadsheet to do the calculation. There are also many such calculators you can find online, but I thought a simple starting project would be to put together my own.

As I go, I’ll include some other basic tax calculations as well. That way I’ll get some practice with version control as well.

Working on it will help me fill in a couple of other gaps in my CSS/HTML knowledge. I’ve always used a form plugin to build and handle HTML forms for my WordPress sites, which was probably a good idea, but it means I never had to work with the nitty gritty of forms much.

I’m going to do all the form work myself this time around. It’ll give me a chance to better understand their ins and outs, including validation etc.

My working CSS knowledge is pretty good, but I just discovered CSS variables are a thing (boy that would have saved some time!) and I’ve never worked with SASS. I’ll use my little calculator as a way to try out some of those new skills as I aquire them.