I've been working through the Udemy course, "The Complete Web Developer in 2019: Zero to Mastery" and one of the exercises was to create a very simple startup page that links to a subscribe form. The challenge here was, as always, to make the page responsive, and to use Bootstrap. The subscription form was created using Mail Chimp. I created the page and I felt confident that it was working. That was until I uploaded it to Github. Suddenly, the button that I included was a dead link. In theory, it should have opened a _blank link to my subscription form. Well, it wasn't doing that. I spend hours going through my code to figure out what was wrong. Nothing. I even started over, completely deleting my subscription form code and trying again. Convinced I must be missing a closing tag somewhere.
Finally, I decided to reach out for help. To the Zero to Mastery discord I went. I provided them my code, and two very helpful people went through it with me line-by-line. The consensus was that I had some javascript from MailChimp that they didn't have. It turns out I used the longer version of the form when everyone else was using the condensed. The answer was to delete that javascript. It was pre-written javascript from MailChimp that I never would have touched on my own. I haven't learned JS yet and was too intimidated to mess with it. Once that JS was gone, the site was working as intended.
What I've learned here is that there's nothing wrong with asking for help. What I love most about the programming community is how willing people are to help. After hours of staring at my code, I received help, and got my page working, in under 15 minutes. The idea that a programmer is a single person alone in a room slaving over code looking for bugs doesn't have to be true. Yes, you should try to find solutions on your own, but you shouldn't be afraid to ask for help. Join a discord community. Use Stack Overflow. Get on a programming subreddit. Find your tribe and then get coding.
Below is the link to my "Startup Page." I like it so much I think I need to start an actual business so I can use it. Also, peep that Grade A responsiveness we love so much.
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