Tag: knitting

Day 59: Fried Brains Redux…

Today was a tad uglier than yesterday. Thankfully, I didn’t feel like such an idiot, as some of our issues were communal. Everyone was having issues with their Nav Bar changing back to a “logged out” status when one clicked onto another page link. The trick was, believe it or not, to NOT do that. We ended up putting in click events for the links rather than hrefs, so that the components switched out, rather than the entire page reloading every time (which was wiping out the user authentication).

Right now, I’m struggling with the edit user page. Whenever I have issues with a page, it’s usually with any type of PUT request. I know it’s not the server, as I’ve tested that ad nauseum with Postman. If this were JavaScript and not Angular/Typescript, I’d be done by now! Not that I’m resentful…One of the other idiot things I’m struggling with is how to hide or show a DIV. With jQuery, it would be a no-brainer. One might say…I’D BE DONE BY NOW!!!

As I’m completely fried this evening, I took a break and have been knitting. I’m so brain-dead that I’ve been constantly checking the pattern, as I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing…AND several rows into this, I discovered that I did do something wrong. I forgot to put in a buttonhole! Guess who’s going to need to learn how to make an Elizabeth Zimmermann “afterthought buttonhole”?

This will have to wait until I figure out make the damned edit user page edit a damned user…preferably the correct user…

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.

Updated the Blog! Day 49: What a difference a day makes…

Thank heavens! Friday was much better than the previous day. Our instructor decided to take us through the process of using Node Express Generator and Postman again, this time relating it to our labs. He went through the steps of how to write code for a server connection and how to test this in Postman. I think what helped us was understanding the steps we needed to go through to write everything correctly and how to test as we went along. We managed to finish not only the Friday lab, but a future one, and in my case, I started a page for the lab after THAT.

In the meantime, this weekend we hit the beach again! I brought my knitting and we had a lovely view.

I have to say, I don’t have dreadful Sundays anymore. It used to be that, by Sunday night, I’d be dreading Monday morning. As hard as Coding boot camp has been, I STILL look forward to each new day of coding. I’m still incredibly grateful for getting this chance.

Day 47: Me and My Big Mouth!

Looks like someone’s been reading this blog at the crack of dawn…

No sooner did I post yesterday’s entry, than our instructor gleefully announced that we were going to take the examples we’d been looking at and WRITE AN ACTUAL NODE SERVER! Before 10:00 am!

Despite the grumbling and complaining, I have to say, it was a good exercise that made everything we’d reviewed previously much easier to understand. In fact, it was SO successful that he had us DO ANOTHER ONE this afternoon using Node express. Fun times.

In other news, we all found out today where we’re going after we graduate from the program. As expected, I’m going back to my old department as a developer. The exciting thing is that I’m getting one of our department’s developers as my mentor! He’s someone I admire who really knows his stuff, so this should work out well.

I actually managed to get home in time to put in some time knitting. I’m currently working in a baby sweater for my great-niece Maddie’s upcoming baby shower.

I know…what kind of sicko knits a baby sweater in BLACK? (WildKnitter has finally lost it.) It makes more sense when you see a picture of the final product:

Not exactly girly-girl, but what the hell…knowing my crazy family, they’ll have her climbing trees and trying out for sports by the age of 5, so why not give her a tomboy-ish hoodie?

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 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 40: Frenemies…

More work on the capstone project today. I’ve just about got everything done except for all the validations. I got burned by my old friend “Is it a value? Is is a number? Is it a string???” (I really need to work this out before the final assessment…) I also was paid a visit by my best friend “Scope”. This is not the same thing as a waterfall project “scope-creep,” but rather the “I have no bloody idea where to put the damned variable” scope. Oh, I also met up with my new bestie “we need to use the CORRECT API” as opposed to the one that returns the entire damned data file.

With friends like these, One really doesn’t need enemies…

On a more cheerful note, I came home a restful evening with a woolier scope…I’m happy to report I’m at the shoulders and hope to get the neck done this weekend.

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.