change – WildKnitter Codes

Work Day 6: Back to reality…

One of the lovely things about being in training—holed up alternatively in a basement classroom or in front of my laptop at home until all hours—was that I got to put off a whole host of day-to-day responsibilities, a lot of which I really hoped would just fade away into oblivion. Sadly, three-months’ worth of backed-up, put-off, ignored, and/or pushed-aside everyday obligations have started to creep back into the picture.

For one thing, I haven’t balanced my checkbook in over three months. I’m not overdrawn, probably because we as a society rarely write checks anymore, so I don’t have a float on anything.

Also, it occurred to me the other day that I need to get my 16-year-old Beetle into the shop for maintenance service. Otherwise, I’m going to be driving in the dead of winter in a snowstorm in back of some enormous 18-wheeler, where I’ll find out the hard way that I have no windshield wiper fluid. I know what you’re thinking…grow up and check your fluids! Honestly, I check the oil, but I never bother to check anything else, as the mechanics usually do that during said maintenance service.

I went back to the gym, which in itself has been hilarious; especially that part where I really thought that walking and doing push-ups for three months was going to be a viable substitute for ALL 10 Bodypump tracks. Oh, sure…that was last Friday and my muscles are STILL in screaming agony. I can’t even get dressed without needing Advil. Even YOGA was a stretch for me after a three-month absence (no pun intended).

I’m still sneaking about, avoiding other things, evaluating whether or not I need to continue them. If nothing else, I do need to carve out free time to do my continuous coding/learning. That’s not going to happen if I still have knucklehead stuff I’m making time for.

Speaking of which, the new work laptop is at 32.49%.

Work Day 5: Pomp and Circumstance…

Friday was our Code Academy graduation day!

I’ve run into several of my classmates over the past week at my office in the sticks. Everyone seems to be in the same boat as I am—either waiting for a new computer and/or waiting for system access before they can start doing real work. About half of us need to know Java, so we’re all frantically viewing Pluralsight and other resources to try to learn it. It’s the same thing with the classmates who are located in home office. I’m happy to report that the poor guy who had no idea where he was going to sit is getting a desk. The other guy who wasn’t quite clear on whom he’d be working for STILL isn’t sure. I think they’re still fighting over who gets to keep him…sadly, two people were missing. One is on a birthday vacation and one was ill.

The graduation was great! They served light finger foods and fizzy beverages. We had high muckety-mucks come to say a few words. We each received a trophy, a certificate, and a very funny certificate for “Most likely to…” Mine, natch, was “Most likely to be the best blogger.”

I can’t believe I’ve come to this point. I’m so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to reinvent myself. That’s what someone in senior leadership called it at our ceremony, and it’s so true. We all get to go on from here to do work that will be interesting, challenging, even fun…

Now I just need a machine. Last I checked, my new laptop is 23.57% done.

Day 63: Transition…or, do I still remember all my passwords???

We watched more online training videos today (Zzzzz…), and had more guest speakers come in. I have to say, the DevOps speaker was very interesting, as I’m still learning about that. The other speakers were great, too. During the presentation by the Release Management speaker, however, I saw a lot of stunned deer-in-the-headlights expressions from fellow students who haven’t had any experience with the IT release process. I was thisclose to blurting out, “You poor souls—you have NO idea what you’re in for!” I also wanted to add that, even if everything in the release process is carefully followed anal-retentively to the letter, the resultant release can be a complete fiasco. I still remember the time years ago when a department did a demo to the masses (a “lunch-and-learn”, or as I call it, a “ruin-your-free-lunch-time-and-learn”) for a major release for a years-long project. They had to STOP the demo and end the meeting. Why? Because they couldn’t get past the first page of the site. Angry red error messages in big capital letters were blazing across the screen like a really bad scene in a Star Trek movie where the Klingons are about to blow up the ship.

The only good thing you could say about this is that at least I got to eat the rest of my lunch in peace…

As far as my transition plan goes, the good news is that my coworker emailed me the complete list of what I need on my new laptop, and what network accesses I’ll need. In fact, tech support has already granted me some of the accesses.

The bad news? My new laptop is going to take possibly 23 DAYS to come in. I desperately need a new one, as my regular work laptop is an ancient 2014 model that takes 10 minutes just to fire up when you turn it on, never mind anything else. We were provided lovely, sleek little laptops for our training that were just a dream to work with, but that was only for training. I can’t tell you how horrible it was to give back my wonderful laptop yesterday and revert back to my giant, crappy laptop that has all the speed, agility, and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier. My biggest nightmare is that my new laptop will take ages to arrive, and that the department will make me do BA stuff again, and I’ll be forever stuck again in the same rut. I’m probably being hysterical over nothing. My coworker assured me that, at worst, they’ll probably just have me study documentation and do Pluralsight Java videos until my laptop shows up.

Day 35: Stretching the Limits…

So much for needless worry! Our Friday project was a retread of the code we tore our collective hair follicles out over the day before. The only real thing that changed was the data (spa services rather than products). Also, as it was a single page application, I didn’t need to hunt down 560 photos. I just needed one for the cover page. Our instructor wanted us all to have a stress-free weekend before the capstone work begins in earnest next week.

Speaking of which, I WILL need pictures for that project, so I’m going to need to start hunting for nice-looking knitting and crocheting examples for my fictitious square contest. We have a copy of the data file setup to which we can add our own data. The only issue I see is that we’re supposed to have LEAGUES, in addition to teams. I’m not quite sure how to work that into a knitting and crocheting square contest, unless I divide the teams into two leagues—knitters and crocheters (I can hear the screaming now).

In the meantime I did a wild & crazy thing. At the beach today (Saturday) I managed to swim all the way to the buoy — twice! In an indirect way I credit it to the Code Academy program. Mentally, I’m stretching myself on a daily basis in ways I never thought possible. In turn, it’s prompted me to challenge myself in other areas of my life.

I’m going to be massively sore tomorrow, but it was SO worth it…

Day 28: Reason Things Out

Today, as most of my days, was a day of desperately trying to figure out how to do things. Add jQuery into the mix, and you get something like THIS:

Today we learned (the hard way) how to dynamically create a table using jQuery. We just learned to do this 5 minutes ago using regular JavaScript, so it was one of those ugly—I REALLY hate the expression “I can’t wrap my head around this,” but it was just like that. It was the mental equivalent of turning around an ocean liner on a dime. I had to stare at the example in our workbook for ages until it clicked. I have to say, once I figured it out, dynamically creating tables is much easier to accomplish via jQuery.

We also had to redo another earlier script in jQuery. For the life of me, I could NOT figure out what was wrong with my code until our instructor had me look at the stack trace. She was so excited to have a real-life multi-line jQuery goof that she called over people in groups of three to look at my screen, and showed everyone how to debug code that uses jQuery. Spoiler Alert: when it says you screwed up in some weird obscure line that’s decidedly NOT yours, you have to trace it back to your original issue (mine being using a $ rather than a # in an id object). I’m not sure how I feel about being held up as an example of bad code…

Day 23: Dynamically creating things…

…Mostly a scene…

Today was a VERY long day. Thankfully, with a bit of help, I figured out my issue from yesterday. I was off by ONE lousy line of code.

Our next adventure was adding, creating, and manipulating things to the html (appendChild, etc.) I managed to figure out how to do all this, but I’m still fuzzy on how to get rid of a dynamically-created table, once it’s created. I know I can just put a blank string in the div that holds it, but that wipes out the table element within the div, which fixes it so you can’t repeat the selection process when you choose another category from the drop down. I carefully inspected the elements after the first table gets created, and it’s odd. The <tr> and <td> tags are created in the html AFTER the <table> <\table> grouping, so one can’t even erase out the table, as technically nothing is in there—even though a table is definitely created on the screen. The only way I see around this is to perhaps figure out a way to dynamically recreate the table element after the div is blanked out. Either that, or do a routine to specifically delete out the <tr> and <td> tags.

After 10:30 pm, I decided to call it a night and to tackle this again tomorrow. Right now, I have the lazy fix in there to just reload the page if you hit the “Start Over” button. I do need to figure out how to erase the rows correctly though, as the OTHER issue is that if you just keep selecting category options from the drop down, and don’t reset, the choices just get added over and over again to the page every time you select a category—they don’t get replaced with the new category’s table entries.

Knitting fair isle with five colors would be easier…

Day 21: Who moved my cheese?

As if we didn’t have enough to do, class-wise, today we shuffled our seats. I think the idea is for us to work with different people. I was just getting used to working with the people I was working with, but of course they just HAD to do something about that…We all realize that once we get out to our new jobs that we’ll be working with different people from time to time. They didn’t need to drive that point home to us right now.

I’ve been fretting, as I’ve now lost my luxury seating in back. I should explain…The guy to my right dropped out of the program the first week, and the woman to my right decided she’d rather sit further up. After wondering if it’s perhaps my breath, I reveled in the fact that this left two empty seats–hence LOTS of room. I’m now in a seat by the door, with only one desk-space to fit all my stuff. I’m one of those people who brings everything except the kitchen sink with me to work, so to say this is an adjustment is an understatement. My monstrously huge work laptop is under the desk because I can’t fit it anywhere else. I have to use a plug in the corner of the room to charge anything, as my new location has NO free outlet plugs anywhere.

I know…get out the tiny violins.

I apologized to my new seat neighbor, in advance, for talking to myself. I’ve been reportedly talking to myself since I first started talking, and it just gets worse when I’m trying to figure stuff out–like coding, of course.

Fun fact: I checked, and you can STILL buy the book Who Moved My Cheese on Amazon. It’s even available on Audible, so that you can listen to it in the car on the way to work. You just know your management is plotting to move your cheese once again…