Snow, code and muffins
03
This year, Easter days are located at a very early date in the calendar. As far as I can remember, Easter has always been in the middle of April, accompanied by the first traces of spring. Right now, at the end of March, spring does not seem to have found the way to us yet. It is pretty cold, and this morning, snow was falling. Not enough to stay and give us a real winter feeling, but enough to keep the roof of the house in front white. While the birds are still singing. That surprises me, because in this area of Germany, you seldom see any snow falling down.
During my free days, I kept on thinking about what else I want to learn in terms of web developing and designing. So far, I have been focused on CSS and blog designing for WordPress and taught myself some PHP and MySQL to understand and use WordPress template tags for WordPress correctly, but I keep on feeling that I should learn more. As you might know, I feel the constant urge to improve my skills, as I am never really fully content with my work. I may quote chess grandmaster Levon Aronian here:
“As long as you are dissatisfied, you improve”.
That it why I am now again reading through a book of PHP and practising with it. In my opinion, programming languages are like the languages we speak: If you have been learning those languages and know how to acquire the necessary knowledge, you will be able to learn other languages, too.
Yesterday, for the first time, I went for the mission to produce some eatable muffins to bring when going to my family’s house. In the past I had only made muffins with ready-made dough, and now I managed to put some eggs, flour and oil (among others) in a bowl, and out of the oven came some fresh muffins really worth to eat… See the photos for more pleasure 
Yeah, I thought I was only one who had thoughts on why Easter comes so early nowadays.
I would love to teach myself programming. I wish I had more free time to hone my graphic design skills. Lately, though, it’s been all work and no play. Ah well!
Happy Easter.
I’ve been trying to learn PHP myself. I’ve only gotten past arrays. It’s a little confusing, but I guess it’s natural to find it somewhat difficult in the beginning. I actually find PHP much simpler than ASP. Perhaps because I’ve been taught C Programming, which is similar.
Those muffins look delicious.
I thought they were cookies when I looked at the thumbnail on your Flickr feed, but when I viewed the larger version, I realized they were muffins.
That’s a good quote. I believe the same thing too! Human imperfections will force us to improve. If we were all perfect then we would stagnate forever. Once I’m done with uni (2 more weeks!), I wanna learn more about computer languages. I know very minimal PHP right - only enough to understand it (when I read, not code) and write enough to conjure up a widgetized Wordpress theme.
I think learning Javascript and AJAX might be good once you’re done with PHP. Javascript seems to have made a come back with the advent of AJAX.
@Lexie: Thanks
You are right, they look like those chocolate chunk cookies. Might be an idea for the next baking session.
@Ivy: Ajax is on my list, too. JavaScript really has come back and the Ajax concept has added some salt to the web soup recently. How do you learn? By books, or by tutorial sites?
For HTML/CSS I just well.. learned it over the years through trial and error. For PHP, I bought a small guide book (though I haven’t finished it) and the Wordpress Codex.
Since Javascript is so old, there are many free tutorials on the web.
As for AJAX. I haven’t seen many so maybe investing in a book is a good idea. 