Tag: crocheting

Work Day 4: What I did on my summer vacation…

Let’s be honest. I had the BEST summer EVER. I spent three months tackling challenging problems, creating websites, coding in different languages—all while indulging my love of knitting and crocheting by using that as the topic for for three major class projects. Oh, and I got to defer dreary, boring crap in my everyday life I didn’t want to do anyway.

Now it was time to show someone the results…today was my big presentation for my boss, my mentor, and The Alum. Before anyone arrived for the meeting, I fired up my home laptop, got the two servers up and running on their ports, brought up my final project, got PostgreSQL going, etc. All was right with the world…until I tried to project my laptop onto the conference room big screen. I watched that lousy little dongle flash white over and over and over again. When everyone arrived, they informed me that a non-company device won’t work with the conference room multimedia equipment. That makes no sense to me—what if you have a guest presenter?

Despite the fact that I find this insane, the fact remained that my laptop was NOT playing nice with the big flatscreen. As luck would have it, my mentor had already downloaded my capstone project to his laptop. He also had my GitHub code. I was able to do the whole presentation from his machine. Everyone loved the site! I was able to intelligently answer questions about the application and the process. I also walked them through my code for the final project, too. Overall, it went very well!

Now, I just need a functioning work machine. Last I checked on the tech site, my laptop is 20.59% done. I’m really dying to know what comprises the .59%…

Day 54: Reprieve…

I’m not sure what divine intervention occurred today, but our instructor pushed out the due date. Instead of having to have our entire server done by 5:00 Friday, he extended the deadline to Saturday at 5:00 p.m…THEN he left the room, came back in, and declared that he didn’t care when it was done, as long as it was done so that it would work with our final Angular project.

I spent most of the day working on router/controller/services again, but with our instructor’s help, I finally managed to understand how to apply it to my existing connections. Anything else wrong was idiotic typos or case-sensitive issues. My personal favorite catastrophe was the “looping” server. All of a sudden, my console started spewing out “get JSON 404 over and over and OVER again. I tried commenting out code and taking out scripts, thinking they were the culprit. Come to find out, it was due to having the Node server debugger still open.

As of Friday afternoon, I STILL wasn’t done. Even though the due date has been pushed out, I’m going to work on the rest this weekend, so that I’m ready for learning Angular on Monday. I need to clean up the code, make sure pages validate, add comments, copy over the Postman tests, and pull out any unnecessary console.log troubleshooting code.

ALSO, I was so proud of myself for finishing the edit user profile page, but at the end of the day I realized that I had completely forgot to enact the delete function. Oops…

If I have time, I may try to render more pages. We only have to go as far as the landing page, but my site makes no sense without at least having the crocheting and knitting patterns page, too!

Day 51: Oh, CRUD…

Today we learned all about MySQL. This was FINALLY something I knew something about. As a BA and previously as a developer, I’ve worked extensively with SQL. The most complicated part of this was installing MySQL Workbench. We mainly created files and performed CRUD—create, read, update, and delete. This was a bit tricky as applied to our new server friends POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE.

“PGPD” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “CRUD,” does it?

There was more work with Postman, as we determined if our routes worked. I had some nasty, nasty, ugly, angry red messages spewing furiously from the command prompt window every time I attempted the “U” in CRUD. It turned out to be something stupid. I’d put “post” instead of “put” when referring back to the db_queries.js. After that was fixed, everything worked fine.

In other news, we had to fill out a survey about our training. Our answers are going to be made into “cards” for our new department, so that they can get to know us better. This is absolutely HILARIOUS in my case, as my “new” department is going to be my old department, and they already know all about me. I felt sort of idiotic when under “fun facts about me” I said that “I knit and crochet!” My department is going to take one look at this and say, “Well, DUH!!!” Then they’re going to laugh until they snort in a decided undignified manner.

We also had to come up with a quote. This is one of my favorites, by W.H. Auden:

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.”

Precisely why I decided to attend Code Academy.

Day 43: Show and Tell!

It was a festive day! We all demo-ed our capstone projects for each other. As usual, other people’s UIs were awesome, although people kept saying they liked mine. I just think these people have never seen a properly-knitted or crocheted afghan before, but I’ll take whatever complements I can get. NEVER underestimate the power of using your pets to shamelessly shill anything on your website…this tiny lad could sell ice to an Inuit…

I did love the variety of what people came up with for their sites. No lie—one guy did the ENTIRE thing as a single-page application (SPA)! It was wild. Another person did dragon boat races that looked like so much fun that I think she’s just talked me into joining our company’s contest for next year.

Our next stop on the Bootcamp Express is going to be Node.js (no pun intended). Right now we’re reading up on this on https://www.w3schools.com/nodejs/default.asp and doing some demos. Monday we’ll be starting in earnest. There is a rumor that we may have some sort of lunch catered in for us for Friday.

Day 41: Swimming in Quizzing…

More work on the capstone project today. I think I’m just about done. I do seem to have some instances where I have member and team ids in the interface that I need to take care of.

The good news is that I got a “patterns” page up and running! Granted, the knitting and crocheting patterns are for really simple squares that my cat Jack could probably pull off if he had opposable thumbs, but that’s neither here nor there. I put the patterns in Bootstrap cards, as that seems to be the best way to keep a nice-looking format for the patterns if you look at them on a smaller screen. Tomorrow I’m going to double and triple-check the validation and all the other miscellaneous things we have to make sure aren’t wrong. I’m also going to beat the crap out of the entire app, checking the console, to make sure nothing is broken. As it was, I had to go back in today and fix a validation that wasn’t working.

I’m much more nervous about the assessment, which we’re taking tomorrow afternoon. I’ve been going over past assessments and my notes, and I swear everything is running together at this point. I’m trying to quiz myself, but there’s a lot here I need to go over. I might be better off getting a good night’s sleep and start looking at this stuff fresh tomorrow morning.

Perhaps I could get Jack to take the test for me. He does enjoy being helpful, as you can see…

Day 37: Hip to be Square on a Carousel!

Our first task for our capstone, now that we’ve figured out some data, is to come up with storyboards for our site. We will pause here to say that, although I’m a whiz at geometric doodling, my general artistic skills leave MUCH to be desired. I managed to come up with basic illustrations for my supporting pages, but for my main page I just hauled off and created a preliminary index page using the Bootstrap Carousel template. I’m going to find my best knitting and crocheting pictures to put in the carousel, and I’m going to use the sections below to explain the site and square drive. I’ve never attempted the carousel before, so that’s going to be my “cool new feature,” I figure (bonus points), unless I can figure out something else.

If we had oodles of time, I’d attempt to do popups for different basic square patterns that someone could print out, but I don’t see me doing that by September 4, when the site is due.

Day 36: Making a List and Checking it Twice…

We are embarking on the big capstone project this week! I’ve finally decided on my theme. For my site, I’m going to have a fictitious charity knitting and crocheting drive to knit squares to make afghans for local organizations: a senior center, a homeless shelter, an animal shelter, and a daycare center. Those will be my four “leagues.” I will have two knitting and two crocheting teams per league, with five members on each team—although, come to think of it, I shouldn’t limit it to five if I want people to produce enough squares for an afghan in a timely manner. I’ll have to figure out certain logistics of my drive…for instance, who’s going to sew all the squares together??? Also, I’ll probably have to have certain guidelines, such as square size, type of yarn used, leaving tails to aid in sewing the squares together, etc. I’ll also have to determine who is able to access my site to enter teams and members.

The entertaining part has been in coming up with the fake member names, phone numbers, and email addresses. As much as I’d love to make it easy and use my real knitting and crocheting friends’ information, that would be a terrible idea. I’m trying to use innocuous names like “Smith,” “Jones,” etc. Also, I’m trying to keep the phone numbers to “555” numbers. Honestly, I’m beginning to run out. I may have to start throwing in some weird names for entertainment.

I’ve already got some funny team names. So far, I have:

  • Knitting Chicks with Sticks
  • Crocheting Happy Hookers
  • Knitting Fools
  • Crocheting Yarns

I may need to rethink one or two of these, as Chicks with Sticks and The Happy Hooker are indeed knitting and crocheting books, respectively. Also, Knitting Fool is a web app sweater pattern generator. I know this is a fictitious class site, but I’d just as soon not be SUED.

I’ve also been scouring my pictures to come up with some good illustrations for the site. For once, I don’t think I’m going to be at a loss for photo material!

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 33: Pondering Capstone Project Scenarios

I’m happy to report I’ve managed to at last get my “Friday” project to a good place, where I’m not tempted to hide it under a rock in shame. Everything is correctly functioning, and I even managed to make the UI look nice. One of my classmates helped me out with using Font Awesome icons to make my edit, view, and unregister links look sharp. Another helped me a few days ago with the “Select One” option for the dropdown, so that looks good.

I’m still pondering what to do for the capstone and the “team” concept. I had an insane idea of making my fictitious crafting teams compete to see who could knit and/or crochet the most squares for Warm Up America, with the winners getting a $100 gift certificate to Webs. However, if this were a real online contest, I can see a few pitfalls:

1. For one thing, I’d need to limit the number of team members, so that I wouldn’t end up with 100 people on the winning team getting $100 apiece (“Um, Sweetums, about that retirement fund…). I could perhaps have the winners as a group getting a $500 gift certificate—though I can just see the ensuing cat fight in the yarn store now. I know, I know…before I start getting hate mail, I’m fully aware that there are male knitters and crocheters! Perhaps I could limit the groups to five people, with the winners each getting $100 apiece.

2. Another issue—how does anyone PROVE how many squares they really produced? The only way to really prove it would be if the teams sent the squares to me, which would be its own logistical nightmare—I’d have to mail all the squares to Warm Up America MYSELF ($$$). Also, people in the home environment probably wouldn’t take too kindly to an entire room being filled to the rafters with tiny 7” x 9” squares (yes, I’m aware this would technically make them rectangles). Perhaps I could have people post a picture of themselves with all their squares before they mail them to Warm Up America. Surely no one could fake piles of squares. I mean, even I—the ultimate crazy yarn woman—don’t have 100 squares lying around to pile up and fake for a picture…However, one can never underestimate the sheer prowess of the truly delusional among us.

I do have time to suss this out before next week.

(I’m sorry Randy and Gary! I know you’d never stage a cat fight in a yarn store! However, I can see one of you convincing the other team members that Webs was no longer in existence… 😈)