Having to watch the solution video to complete the challenge

Hi Jonathan,

One trick that worked for me was to make sure I was actually typing the code along with the instructional videos. When watching Guil teach the courses it seems easy and unnecessary to type the same code but its worth it. For one thing, its all about repetition, so the extra muscle memory is valuable, and its easier to tweak some settings and test things out as you go. As Amrit commented above, it is a long journey, and every extra keystroke is another step in that journey so dont be afraid of the repetition.

I also recommend taking good notes. Evernote has been a great tool as I accumulate more knowledge. Its easy to bring along with me, and is searchable. Its ok to use notes since a large part of web development is glorified google searching.

If you find yourself really stuck, maybe try another track and go back to this challenge and try again.

Remember, if it was easy, everybody would do it. Keep up the hard work!

If it's any help, I felt like I didn't know what I was doing until I coded along with the videos (just like David said). On top of that, while going along with the videos, I'll often pause it and play around with the values of each attribute just to see what they do. It helps solidify the functionality for me when I can see not only what the video intends for it to do, but what it does when it's played around with.

Another important thing to mention is that applying a border to whichever containers you are adjusting helps a TON. For this challenge I put a solid 1px red border around each of the containers. This helped me visualize what was wrong with my placement, and showed me exactly what my changes were doing as well.

Lastly, I think it's important to know that the final solution in this video is not the end-all solution. I actually changed the class names in the html (because I mistakenly believed a hyphen was missing between the words "primary col" and "secondary col". While the video asked for 50% widths, I was stuck on getting the columns next to each other. I didn't think of the negative margin technique, but what I decided to do was to make the width 45% to make room for both of them. After that rather than changing the padding for both, I gave the primary-col a margin-right value of 5% to break up the columns and allow it to adjust for the screen size.

Not only did I find my own way through trial and error, but I would even argue that my method is simpler and requires less moving parts than Guil's solution.

What's important is not the exact way we achieve the results, but that we get an outcome that is equal, simple as possible, and easy to understand.

If you're having trouble with the challenges I can't recommend following the lessons enough. Not only will it help solidfy the foundations you're learning, but it's essentially practice leading up to each challenge!

ya i got the columns to be right above each other in one column but couldnt figure out how to get them side by side. i then watched the solution video. I know a lot of times i want to speed up my learning and i dont take my time to first watch the video then rewatch it while doing the code along. THEN try out the solution on my own. This videos before had definetely give us ALL the info we need to solve the challenege question so its all repition.