Olivia Jordan

Building More Than a Website: My Two Weeks with Kode with Klossy

This summer, I spent two weeks at an intensive camp with Kode with Klossy. When I first signed up, I was mostly curious. I had recently started building my own website, and I kept wondering how it actually worked behind the scenes. How does a page load? How do buttons respond when you click them? How does something go from an idea to something you can open in a browser?

I also knew that college is not that far away anymore. I wanted to understand what studying computer science or design might really feel like. I did not want coding to remain a mysterious skill that only other people understood. I wanted to try it myself.

During the camp, we built a working website from scratch. That phrase sounds simple, but it felt huge. We started with basic structure and slowly layered on style and functionality. At first, everything looked plain and confusing. Lines of code felt like a foreign language. But little by little, patterns began to make sense.

What surprised me most was how creative coding can be. I used to think of programming as something rigid and purely technical. Instead, it felt like problem solving mixed with design. Changing just a few lines could completely transform the way a page looked or behaved. It reminded me of adjusting composition in a drawing or shifting dynamics in a piece of music. Small changes could have a big impact.

There were moments of frustration. Often my code did not work, and I had no idea why. A missing character or a misplaced bracket could break everything. But those moments were also the most satisfying to solve. When the screen finally showed what I intended, it felt like unlocking a puzzle. By the end of the two weeks, our website was fully functional. It was not perfect, but it was real. I had helped build something that worked, and that feeling stayed with me.

This experience changed how I see technology. Instead of just being a user, I began to understand what it means to be a creator in the digital space. Coding is not just about logic. It is about structure, creativity, and persistence. In many ways, it connects to my interests in art and design. Behind every beautiful interface is an invisible framework holding it together. There is still much to learn. But these two weeks gave me confidence.

They showed me that I can step into unfamiliar territory, struggle a little, and come out stronger. Whether or not I pursue computer science in the future, I know this experience expanded how I think. Now, when I look at my own website, I do not just see images and words. I see structure. I see possibility. And I see how much more there is to build.