A common topic of discussion and meme among web development is how to center a div, as the year goes by and now AI dominate the internet I decided to use AI to create a personal challenge with the goal to use AI to introduce me to different UI programming languages and platform targets
Explain it in a different way, you might have asked AI this question. When it comes to code, AI can build entire applications, but most importantly it can explain complex subjects in many different perspectives which helps a lot when learning something new. And I believe that I still need to understand a project architecture in order to fully guide AI to build code for me otherwise I risk getting into error loops without solution, the craftsman must still master its craft.
It's about using AI in order to learn new programming languages, new platform targets and ultimately burst out of my web centric bubble, I'm not going to fully master each of these platforms, but I'm going to introduce these platforms to myself, and hopefully learning valuable lessons out of this experience that I can use to build high quality UIs - at the end I might value the importance of the web
The plan is to introduce myself into all the mainstream platforms:
Originally I thought it was going to be an easy task, but after finishing the challenge on iOS with Swift UIKit, I went into too many details about Flutter, it's multi-platform nature and my past experience with React Native made me question its internal and I lost track of my original goal which is simply "centering a div"
It made me realize if I'm going to finish this challenge, I must stick to the plan and reduce the scope to first accomplish the goal, and when it's time to share what I've learned I do need to understand more about the platform and internals to explain it in more details, but I must do it with caution because I can get caught into details and create an overwhelming learning experience, graphics interface as we know it today is a 50+ year old science and I won't grasp all of it easily to explain a single GUI framework
I decided I'm going to write about the experience in my blog, it should help me stick to the plan because writing helps a lot to wrap up knowledge, this is the first article, kinda of explaining the journey thus far and I believe I should be writing about Swift UIKit and Flutter soon-ish
I'm going to end up with a blog-post that explains the challenge, and links to each platform and language explaining "how to center a div" on these platforms and it should be a fun discovery project
I must say that I believe GUIs are the future, because it's humans entry point to the digital world and computing, my ultimate motivation is to understand GUIs as an abstract computer science challenge, I don't want to spend my life stuck on the web platform challenges with CSS, I want to understand what makes a UI, the fundamental principles that makes all UIs possible, how each platform tackles this fundamental challenge and so on.
If you like the challenge or are curious, you can reach out on 𝕏 social at @imfelquis, ask me anything, I also have an email at my 404 page, let's stay in tough and connect, check my linklist for other social media links.