Tag: html

Going Forward…

I’ve been pondering how to move forward with my blog. I know daily spleening about my ups and downs attempting to learn Java and JUnit testing are rather redundant and tedious. I may start blogging two or three times a week. If nothing else, I need extra time to finally make it through my Udemy course!

I’ve also been thinking about how to keep my JavaScript, HTML, Node.js, and CSS skills fresh. I ran into one of my fellow Code Academy classmates, and he mentioned needing to “use it or lose it.” It’s almost like a higher power was speaking directly to me. It’s interesting…our instructor has stressed the importance of having a side project, along with one’s coding at work. In fact, he explained that if you’re looking for a new job, the first thing employers want to see is what you have out on GitHub that you’re working on. I’ve asked around, though, and many developers at work have told me that there is no way in hell they ever have the spare time to do this–especially mothers with small children.

However, I think I have an idea, for something that might encompass keeping up my skills AND having fun with yarn. I’ve been googling. There are TONS of websites devoted to knitting pattern generators (knittingfool.com being one I’ve used), there don’t seem to be any crocheting pattern generators, other than for “graphgans,” which are afghans with a design or a picture on them. There are literally generators out there where you can scan in a picture of your dog and they will spit out a pattern (filet crochet, knitted, afghan crochet, single crochet, etc.) for you to make an afghan with Fido emblazoned on it. I’m thinking I could try a knitting generator, to get my feet wet; but I think I’d ultimately like to make a crochet sweater pattern generator. I’ve tried using ones for knitting, plugging in a crochet gauge instead, but the increases and decreases for crocheting are quite different, AND they’re different for different types of crochet stitches. I DO still have a domain name out there that I bought back when I did my first HTML/CSS project for class…

This could work…

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…

Day 46: Copying Off Tim’s Homework

We did more work today with Node.js. A lot of this consisted of going over various servers and in one instance, copying over one repository and making changes to add a field. This was a bit tougher than it sounds as we had to change a server, a module, scripts, html, and, in my case, the css style sheet to make the added line bold. In time honored tradition, my final run tanked until someone pointed out that I had named the field by one ID name in the html, and by quite another in the scripts. Once that was rectified, everything ran fine.

Our instructor pointed out that this was all closer to reality, where one is often called upon to modify existing code rather than creating brand new jobs.

This does remind me of a time, years ago, when I was a BA on a small project on the only agile team I’ve ever been on that operated in an actual agile manner. That being neither here nor there—we had two absolutely kickass developers on our team. They could figure out how to do just about everything we threw at them. In fact, they are part of the reason I wanted to become a developer again—I always admired their talent. I do remember that even THEY would do a certain amount of duplication/alteration—they referred to it as copying off each other’s homework.

I still sort of feel like we’re really getting off easy this week.

Day 45: Who moves my cheese (redux)?

We’ve embarked on Node.js AND new seating (again). I have to say, I am grateful to be sitting on the end of the row, seeing as I’m practically CRIPPLED today. Over the weekend, in addition to frollicking at the beach, I did several hours worth of gardening. I compounded this by doing more gardening this morning before getting ready for class. May we pause here to say it was a good thing I knocked off this morning when I did, as THIS is what appeared on our motion detector while I was getting ready:

I suspect someone in the neighborhood is either leaving food and/or trash out…

Due to all this activity (gardening, not the bear), I’ve been massively stiff all day. I took my customary stroll at lunch to visit the birds, but it was more of a slow shuffle. Right now, I can’t even KNIT due to my wrist being strained from plucking up weeds for hours (the HORROR). I’m hoping that more Aleve and a good night’s sleep will help me out.

Anyway, we started off today in earnest with Node.js. We are working our way up to creating servers. Right now, we’re looking at examples and copying server code to study it. We also took our capstone projects, copied them to a new repository, and changed the html pages to phps. We also grouped code that was the same on all the pages into “include” phps. It was a fun exercise. I, of course, found a few things I really want to change about my capstone project for formatting, but didn’t really have time, other than to correct the crooked buttons. If we’re going to keep on with this, I do want to eventually correct the cards in the pattern section so that they format a bit better with media queries.

That is, if I can MOVE tomorrow…

Day 42: It was an ugly business…

…but clean living prevailed!

Yes, I’m quoting Dudley Do-Right. For you young people out there googling “Dudley Do-Right”—no, I have no clue why Snidely Whiplash tied women to train tracks, and yes, we can safely assume this was “pre” Me-Too…

Today was indeed an ugly business. I went from:

  • “I’m just going to do some testing and validating, and checking to make sure I don’t have references to a previous project site in the code”

to:

  • “Oh, My Freakin’ GOD!!!”

I validated what I thought was my most straightforward, stable page only to have all sorts of bells and whistles go off over on https://validator.w3.org/nu/. Then I remembered…in order to make my team details page less “tabular-like” I had grouped some fields together for a nicer-looking interface. Fun fact: if you indeed have a “table” layout, HTML takes a dim view of grouping two <id> elements for two different data elements together in one <td> cell. It gives the expression “strange bedfellows” a whole new meaning. Indeed, I actually had a ménage à trois going on in one cell…

So, with hours to go until the 3:00 deadline, I embarked on changing the layout from a table to a Bootstrap grid. As this was all dynamically produced in JavaScript I had to figure out how to do this for my new format. I remembered what our other instructor said about “scraping out the HTML,” so that’s exactly what I did. I STILL had some validation issues (two fields are apparently frowned upon in more than just table cells), but our long-suffering instructor helped me out with this (can you say <span>?). I ended up with a similar, pleasing interface, but without all the ugliness under the hood. I even dynamically reformatted the ménage à trois into an unordered list in the Bootstrap grid!

I swear to God, when this thing FINALLY validated around 2:30, I got up and cheered. I may have even done a happy dance—it’s all a blur. After the rest of my checks, I was done with about 15 minutes to spare. I was by no means alone…many of us had the **** fairy rain down upon us today.

THEN, we had to take the final JavaScript assessment. After all the Sturm und Drang over studying for this…

drumroll…

drumroll…

96!!!! 96, baby! I got a 96 on the final assessment! I couldn’t believe it!

I still got it.

Day 32: Up, up, and array!

Today we continued to modify our projects to add new courses, and do put requests to modify a table. I swear I felt like EINSTEIN when I dynamically created a pre-filled input form to modify data and IT WORKED. I even managed more validations.

For some reason, the wheels fell off the wagon for me when we proceeded onto multistring queries. I’ve gotten so used to doing long concatenations to create dynamic HTML that, oddly, something that’s supposed to be much simpler just threw me. Also, we’ve started using functions like find(), findIndex(), etc. which are simpler, but seemed ALIEN after what we’ve coded before.

It’s sort of like that expression, “why go through the door when there is a perfectly good wall right there?”

I muddled through but it was both frustrating and infuriating.

I did get out this evening with the knitting peeps, though!

Day 30 and a half: UI Envy

It was an UGLY day of trying to pump out yet another Friday project. I stayed at class until almost 7:00 p.m. on Friday, trying to finish. The good news is that I got the jQuery/JavaScript working, and I managed to throw in field validations by the end of the day. I still struggle with where to put events in relation to the JSON callbacks. I did manage to validate the dynamic HTML, which was a good thing, as I had some ghastly error involving my generation of dynamic links onto a page.

This morning (Saturday) we had an email from our other instructor. He had some general feedback on the sites he’d seen so far in GitHub. It actually was a good thing, as I was able to check on and update my site. Despite looking it up on stackoverflow.com, I struggled with getting an image into my readme.md file until I just downloaded one of his readme files out of GitHub and reverse-engineered it to fit my needs.

So, the only thing I had left to do before the Saturday 5:00 p.m. deadline was to make the user interface look good…

I have a confession. I’m artistic at certain things, but not others. Even with my knitting and crocheting, I great at techniques, but struggle over what colors to choose that will work together. It’s always the way…I’ll think I have a great-looking website, but then I’ll look at other classmates’ Friday projects and mine is pathetic-looking in comparison! When it’s a matter of coming up with funny-sounding or interesting text, I’m good at that, but my illustrations and placements are usually plain and downright dreary.

For instance, I FINALLY got an image to cover my Jumbotron on the main page, without looking stretched-out, blurry, or just plain ridiculous. I was so excited! Then I glanced over at other pages and people have carousels going, and multiple interesting illustrations, and beautiful interfaces that just made mine look like the sad, pathetic wallflower of all sites.

I’ll need to up my game for the capstone project coming up…