Day 19: the ups and downs

In contrast to the utterly CRAZY day that was my yesterday, today was much better. We had labs to do, but the calculations were similar to yesterday’s scripts, so it was much easier. Either that, or I’m getting better at hooking up JavaScript to web pages.

I think talking a walk this morning when I got up, rather than trying to squash steps in during our lunch break gave me back some of my sanity. Okay…I’ll admit, the pizza lunch, courtesy of our instructor, didn’t hurt, either! Someone also mysteriously sprung for Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins…there should be some sort of quality award for whoever this person is.

I may be singing another tune tomorrow when we’re cramming in our Friday project. I’m trying to get a jump on it tonight by setting up my Bootstrap settings, css, and JavaScript flies ahead of time. I really hope our instructor wasn’t kidding about it being a travel site project, because I just downloaded a boatload of travel pictures, including our Washington, D.C. trip. I can’t take credit for the picture below. Our friend Larry doctored this one up!

Day 18: My life on the “outside”…

…or, WHAT LIFE? Note: whining ahead.

After yet another day of staying very late, trying to figure out code (and desperately trying to remember what I learned last week, that I’m evidentially supposed to be incorporating into the exercise du jour), I’ve come to the conclusion that I really can’t make plans after class during the week. I have a whole plethora of activities that I usually do after work that are just not going to be possible anymore—at least not until I finish training.

So far, this week, I’ve had to blow off my Tuesday night knitting group (sacrilege!) and another activity I do on Wednesday afternoons. We have some friends visiting tomorrow night, whom I’m probably going to wave “hello” to on my way into my home study to do more work (my classwork portfolio is a tad out of date). Oh, and we’re having SEVERAL people to the house this weekend—something we’d planned long before I knew I was going to be spending my summer snorkeling through CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. Ask me if I’ve done ANYTHING to prepare for this…so far, my poor, long-suffering spouse is having the shoulder the burden for this.

Don’t even ask me about my exercise schedule…okay, you may ask. This was the extent of my exercising for today. At lunch, I enough time to walk outside and take a picture of this bird…that’s it.

Day 17: Remedial Training

Those of you who know me well know the story of how I ended up in the 1st grade bottom reading group. Why? I couldn’t pass the teacher’s stupid test. I don’t even remember what was on the test. All I know is that I blew it three times in a row. It wasn’t until one day, when my teacher saw me reading while out in the playground (my mother had been giving me “Peanuts” cartoon collection books to read for age), that I finally got bumped into a much higher level group.

Fast forward to present day Code Academy. Our instructor held a special session on Functions for those of us who are still confused. On the one hand, I was grateful for the in-depth explanation, and it really did help me to understand how they work, what different ones do (or return, as the case may be). Also, many of us were still scratching our heads over parameters vs. arguments, and which variables are global vs. just in the function. I was particularly out to sea as far as how to deal with objects passed to a function. Thanks to her help, I managed to complete the rest of my labs. Granted, it took me a few hours after class to complete everything, but I did it.

On the other hand, it was embarrassing to admit I really needed the extra help—I almost didn’t take up our instructor on the offer to break into a separate group. It is always uncanny that we as human beings have no issue racing to see a doctor for anything physically wrong with us. In fact, for many people my age it’s practically an intramural sport. However, any time we have anything else wrong that’s not below the neck, we consider it a weakness and the height of embarrassing. The whole point of this training is for me to learn how to code. It really shouldn’t matter if I need extra help, as long as I end up as a competent coder who can take on any challenge.

It was still embarrassing, though.

Day 16: Stringing You Along…

We had two major blasts today in class.

One: we got our Friday projects back. The good news is that, by and large, our instructor felt we did well. The bad news is that I completely spaced on putting all my inputs into a <form> element—apparently, I wasn’t the only one, and there were a few other things I missed that needed attention. We all had issues to correct, on which we spent most of the morning working. One issue, a link not working, turned out to be a non-issue. I suspect our instructor had us immediately work on our defects as, in real life, during an Agile Sprint, it would be expected that you would correct mistakes right away. As a BA, I’ve been on the other side of this equation (“What do you mean, you didn’t make the changes YET???”).

Two: we worked with strings today. We used different functions and methods, such as indexOf(), lastIndexOf(), substr, slice, etc. Before you ask, NO…this is NOT as much fun as working with that other type of string (a.k.a. yarn).

This all culminated in an exercise to parse out a full name by prefix (if present), first name, middle name, last name, and suffix (if present). After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I DID IT!!! Woohoo!!!

Tomorrow we work on dates…no, not the type you eat…

Day 15: The Outside World

Last night, after class, I took a much-needed respite and went to a music festival concert. Our local orchestra does a concert series every Friday during the summer, featuring a different theme every week. Last night’s was a tribute to Elton John. It was a fantastic night.

Of course, that’s not what I’m here to talk about…earlier in the day, we all survived a 1-day—we’ll call it a sprint, for lack of a better word (Agile pun intended). We had eight hours to create a 4-page site featuring three financial calculators with about six different equations. I confess we got an assist from our instructor on one, but once we got that one done and figured out in JavaScript, it was fairly easy to google for the rest of the equations and plug them into our pages. It was fun, too, as we revisited our HTML and CSS coding with Bootstrap thrown in, and got to style the pages to our liking. We all ended up with pages that worked by the end of the day. It was A MIRACLE.

I raced to the concert last night, all excited to tell people about my wonderful achievement. Fun fact: unless people are coders, NO ONE really wants to hear about your adventures in coding. I was excitedly explaining my entire eventful day, my ups and downs and struggles to make the scripts work correctly. My librarian friend, who has taken coding classes as part of her library science degree, did understand what I was talking about, but everyone else looked like a deer in the headlights. It might have been more exciting to have the site loaded in a GitHub io repo to show them, but I hadn’t had time to do that.

We artists are SO misunderstood…the only thing less exciting for these poor people would have been had I tried to explain knitting short rows to them…

Day 14: Fried Brains…Fried Brains…

Today we upped the ante on functions by now displaying results in the browser. So, if you want an online calculator or need to find out what 38 degrees Celsius in Paris REALLY means (read: Fort Lauderdale, FL is cooler), then I have the apps for you!

As we’re going to be going full-tilt tomorrow with our Friday lab day, I’m taking a break from my nightly studying to get in a little knitting. I’m attempting to put sheep on a sweater. I’m so fried from class today that it took me 15 minutes to locate black yarn for their little stick legs. I need to divide up small balls of off-white yarn for their fluffy little bodies, but I’m trying not to think about that right now. This is intarsia, and I haven’t quite worked out how much is going to be needed for each ball.

Knitting and sheep pattern

I originally thought this pattern was an in-the-round fair isle yoke, so I wasn’t stressing…until I looked at the pattern AGAIN. I’ve essentially knit everything else in the round, so doing drop sleeves with intarsia on the front and back of the sweater is going to be–oh, let’s be positive and say it’s going to be an ADVENTURE.

My friend Sheila, who–if they gave them out–would have a black belt in knitting, suggested I just modify the pattern to be in the round. However, after days on end of staring at Visual Studio Code, trying to decipher why the #%^*ing code ISN’T WORKING this time and why there are angry red alerts in the F12 console–I just can’t face the prospect of counting stitches to figure out how many little sheep I can knit in the round, and how many more little balls of yarn I’d need…

I suspect lab day tomorrow is going to be simpler than that.

Day 13: Hoisted by My Own Petard

Of course, I don’t mean this the way William Shakespeare did in Hamlet…

Today, we were introduced to the wonderful world of JavaScript functions. We got our feet wet with simple functions(). Then we did functions where we passed arguments to parameters (this sounds like something you’d do with relatives at the dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner table, but I assure you it’s nothing like that). THEN, we got into passing arguments to parameters and RETURNED something…which is where it got really confusing for a lot of us. I kept getting the variables inside and outside of the function mixed up. Also, we learned that variables are “hoisted”–that is to say, they are moved to the top of the current scope (to the top of the current script or the current function). However, their initializations are NOT hoisted. Then we got into even MORE murky depths with the introduction of the “let” and “const” keywords, which are NOT hoisted, and behave in a most peculiar fashion, to the point where…yes, I definitely think I need some Advil…

The good news is that we went back to some of our previous code and retooled it to have functions. If anyone wants me to calculate the area of a circle or a square for them, I’m all set! I can also tell you if a year is a leap year…

We are having to keep up a portfolio of all our work, which I think I finally have up to date. Our instructor wants us to print this out, which I’m going to need to do at work, as I’d probably kill our home printer churning out all the pages I have so far…and this is only DAY 3 of our JavaScript training; this is going to go on for several more WEEKS. I suspect I’m going to have the equivalent of War and Peace or Moby Dick by the time I’m done.

Day 12: JavaScript Jive…

…think I’m slowly getting the hang of it.

Day two of attempting to work with others went much better. Today, we paired up with different people—they’re going to rotate us daily into different groups, cycling through three different combinations (all I could think of was, “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium”). This time around, we worked together on mutual code reviews. We have been working out different ways to solve things. For example, we sussed out a way to determine if a year is a leap year. We did routines to figure out the minimum and maximum of a group of numbers (this was a trick…rather than if, else if, else we only had to use the Math.min and Math.max functions for that). We did code to determine sales discounts, taxes, etc. We even figured out how to display a greeting based on what time of day it is. This probably all sounds Mickey Mouse to people with any coding experience, but we’re all having fun figuring things out. We haven’t gotten around to writing functions yet, but that should be coming soon.

I even had a bit of breathing room today. I got out a few times during breaks to take walks around the building. I also (GASP) managed to get out this evening for my knitting group! To give you an idea of my level of distraction lately, someone at the knitting group pointed out that I’d COMPLETELY neglected to knit the intarsia sheep onto the back of my sweater! I had to frog it back to the armpits and start over again.

Day 11: Attempting to play well with others…

Today marked the first day of our JavaScript training. The good news is that it’s challenging and interesting, and our instructor for this training phase is great. The bad news: I can’t remember whole chunks of high school math. It’s just gone right out of the window. The area of a circle? Damned if I know. Multiplication tables? I only remember up to 10 x 10–I’m not sure I ever got beyond that. Calculations to get remainders??? Exponents? Hahahahahah!!! One would never know that, once upon a time, math in any form was my best subject.

The other major negative—we’ve started “working together” on solving problems. I have a sordid confession…I’m an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, with the “I” being practically off the chart. They used to put on my first grade report card, “Doesn’t play well with others.” Don’t get me wrong…now that I’m an adult, I do understand the reality that no one exists in a bubble, and we all need each other (you can start singing “Kumbaya” any time now), and that one does need to work with people, no matter what one does do for a living. However, working with others has always been a challenge for me, even under the best of conditions. Throw in attempting to understand a new programming language and desperately trying to recall PEMDAS and square roots, and you have the recipe for disaster. My group and I did muddle through, despite my constant interjections of, “but this is the way you’re SUPPOSED to do it!” (that pesky “J” part of INFJ)…and then finding out that NO…I was quite wrong in certain instances.

I know from past experience in working on teams, that the beginning is going to be ugly; but I’ll eventually adapt, once I get used to working with my group members.

This is going to be a long week…and I have a feeling I’m going to be learning much more than just JavaScript.

Day 10: Passed the 2-Week Hurdle!!!

We aren’t supposed to discuss our grades (well, at least not with the class), but suffice it to say I was INSANELY pleased with mine–It was in the higher category. Overall, I’d say we all did great. We did a demo, where we showed off our websites–everyone had great sites! I had a good giggle because two people did sites devoted to Disney World. We have a very good friend who, in turn, has crazed family members who are GAGA over anything Disney, to the point where their entire house is decorated with Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, etc. If my classmates go live with their pages, I’m sending the links for my friend to send to his family.

The rest of the day was devoted to self-study in preparation for next week, punctuated by a meeting with our instructor and our manager for the program. They informed each of us, individually, that we were good to move forward with the rest of the training, and asked if we were in.

Am I in??? Let me see…

Door #1: Meetings featuring tall, towering arguments over whether or not the sentence should have one or two “twos” in it, or is it “to” or “too” or should we just pick a code, or…

Door #2: Creating, coding, and engaging in the most fun I’ve had in a very long time?

Really…there is no choice.

Honestly, there hasn’t been a choice since I did that first web development challenge for the program. I created some basic HTML and CSS code, fired up the resultant page and–VOILA! I’d created a real page!!! I mean, how can you top that? Honestly, I have to keep going, if for no other reason than I need to get my new website outfitted with JavaScript and anything needed to make it a real, functioning site.

I’m looking forward to the next chapter…