Fotomatic - stuck & discouraged

Hey folks - this is not really a post for help, I still have a ways to go in terms of completing the Fotomatic Project in the “Making a Website Responsive” section of the Full-Stack Engineer Career path

But, I’m writing to commiserate with others – I am so incredibly stuck and am at the point where I am beginning to feel discouraged. I thought I had a good grasp on basic HTML and CSS, but cannot seem to pull it together to create a cohesive page.

I don’t want to look at the solution, but I also don’t know what to do. I’ve been toying with my screen for two days, reading through W3schools or developer.mozilla, but I am so stuck.

Anyone else?

How do I push through, but also not just stay stuck?

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Hi there,

My best advice is to take a break or to ask for help! It’s natural to feel discouraged, but don’t lose hope. Learning a new skill is hard. Step back and take breaks when you’re feeling frustrated, and come back when you feel refreshed. And don’t forget about the community! A lot of our fellow learners have struggled with Fotomatic (myself included)–so there’s nothing to be ashamed of when asking the community for help or clarification.

Just know that sometime soon (and probably sooner than later!) you’ll understand and push through it!

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I skipped over this project entirely. I recently went back to it, and I still don’t know where to begin. This project hasn’t been updated since 2019. I can do the JavaScript projects (so far), but this one is leaving me stumped. I’e seen so many people also stuck on this project and it’s noticeable there’s no walkthrough for it like other projects have. I’m wondering if even the people who created this project could solve it.

There’s “challenge” and there’s “this is completely unproductive and it’s time to move on”. The instructions are not clear.

And if anyone really struggled for days on end to solve a problem in a real job, they’d be deemed incompetent and fired.

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I too have been stuck on this for a few days and want to pull my hair out. I think doing this project from scratch would be easier than trying to fix the broken code. Anyhow, it seems there is a lot of struggle with this project, and OK to skip this one. I think I might fork this project and create all my own media queries.

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Agreed. Not only is this project a complete unhelpful mess, but even the styles specified in the instructions don’t match up with the site. The fonts in the stylesheet don’t exist and there are so many mistakes/ missing information it’s impossible to determine what’s intentional and what needs correcting. Fo we need to download the fonts ourselves? Are there errors in the HTML too we need to look at? (Probably).

It’s a shame that Codecademy don’t put more effort into helping people learning to code. They seem to have given up altogether, given that there has been no updates to this project for years, much like other prohects. It’s essentially a bunch of “do this, click this, quiz”, followed by “Here’s a massive project with no instructions or guidance, good luck”.

Definitely in need of a revamp.

Example of instructions not matching styles: The Fotomatic logo. According to the job spec, the required Logo is “Roboto-Mono-Regular”. Well, setting that as the font-family does not work. Indeed, in the CSS solution, there is no such font-family style set to any attribute. Also, in the spec sheet, you can see that the logo looks NOTHING like the logo in the “final” or “correct” solution. No wonder everyone is so confused.

Yet another error/ issue in the given specs: Some of the fonts are designated as “font-family” while others are “font-face”. If you look in the solution, font-face is never used in the CSS. Additionally, the font family is not, for instance “Robot-Mono-Regular” but simply “Robot”, sans-serif; . Likewise, there is no instance of a “font-face” containing “Rubik-Regular”, but “Rubick”, sans-serif;.