Day 48: Deer in the Headlights

This was one of those days where I almost stormed out of the classroom. I had to remind myself that we only have a few more weeks before we’re going to be REALLY confused in our new jobs, and that this is probably a picnic in comparison…

There is something dreadful about learning things piecemeal, and then having to cobble it all together for an assignment—I know…just like real life. Today we combined login/registration screen logic, get and post logic, Node express, listing out file data, etc. into one site. The truly mind-bending thing was that we used Node Express Generator to spit out the scaffolding, and then we had to take all the bits and pieces we’ve learned this week and somehow apply them to this new format.

Among the disasters:

1. My site got completely hosed by the ****ing layout.hbs file. What was a normal-looking index page all of a sudden resembled some mutant atrocity. The only way I can describe it is that it looked like our cat Jack jumped on the keyboard in the middle of coding and then used his ass to press “save.” This particular issue turned out to be due to some random css code I’d somehow copied in by mistake for my login page formatting.

2. Partial hbs files are now unnecessary due to the aforementioned layout.hbs file. This has COMPLETELY wiped out the careful work I’d done previously dividing page contents into the partials. NOT THAT I’M RESENTFUL.

3. I also struggled over trying to figure out if I needed one script file or one per page, seeing as there was overlapping logic.

4. I compared notes with others, and think we all suffered from tiny gremlins scurrying away with what’s left of our brain cells, because many of us could not, for the life of us, remember how the hell we listed out fields into an unordered list, let alone how we previously did gets and posts in AJAX calls.

5. I personally kept getting confused over what went in server code and what went in regular front-end script code—especially since we’ve been introduced to routes, or as I like to call them, the bastard cousins of server script.

I’m hoping to gain more clarity tomorrow, as we have to combine everything into a Friday project that we aren’t starting until 1:00 p.m. The idea is to have NO actual html pages, except for bare-bones, as we have to use Postman (which I barely understand) to test the server code instead.

I have the ugly feeling that I’m not going to have a weekend…

Author: WildKnitter

By day I work for a large insurance company. By night and the rest of my life, I share my life with a spouse, a bossy cat, four step-children, and many, many grandchildren. Also, of course, my mad passion is my knitting and crocheting. My latest adventure is something called Coding Bootcamp!