Reflections of the Semester

Throughout this semester, I’ve gained new media design and web development skills that I know will prove extremely advantageous for me in the future, as well as continued to build on the skills I learned last semester. The semester has flown by much quicker than I could have imagined, and looking back on it seems like a bit of a blur to be honest; however, the skills I’ve taken away from this course are ingrained in my memory and will undoubtedly be ones I take with me throughout my career.

I think that the data gathering and display tools are the ones I consider the most valuable for my future. With any kind of storytelling on the web, data visualizations
can be a truly effective way to make information more comprehendible, and the tools to gather and display data will be priceless skills for any journalist or mass communication professional to have. In that regard, I feel that learning how to create a form, the SQlite manager, making infographics, web scraping and Ruby on Rails were some of the most crucial skills I gained throughout this semester.

If there was one overriding theme throughout the semester (and last semester) it’s that when you’re a web developer and/or designer, it is important to have all of these skills, but the goal should always be to make a page or a story be as effectively presented as possible. Usually that will mean having simplicity in mind as you design, a point that was driven home by ISOJ 2013 speaker and Washington Post design director Joey Marburger. Sometimes that will mean focusing on making a site responsive in a user-personal sense in addition to responsive in a technical sense as Travis Swicegood of the Texas Tribune emphasized. The main point is that you won’t and shouldn’t implement every skill you learn just because you can; evaluate the site/page/purpose and decide from there what skills, software, elements to include.

Following graduation, I plan to get more involved within the tech community wherever I end up living in order to stay up-to-date with the latest tech news, web development skills and design techniques. I want to join tech meet-ups, as well as stay up-to-date by reading tech news on a regular basis. Hopefully by doing this, I can effectively build on the skills I already have and continue to improve.