Tag: nevertoooldtocode

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…

Workday #46: Spring Forward!

Since yesterday didn’t contain enough drama, I elected to multiply this tenfold by taking on a new user story. On the surface, it appears to be something I can handle–simply change the driver age for a commercial or personal auto claim so that the age is Age at Loss vs. Current Age so that it gets passed to our other system correctly. I waded into the integration code for Spring Batch in GitHub and I think I’ve narrowed down the issue to one method in one class. It appears to be an overloaded method, where if you only pass the date of birth parameter, you get the Current Age; however, if you pass the date of birth AND the date of loss parameters, you get the Age at Loss, which is what we’re after. I’ll have to scour all the code of course, to make sure, but I’m fairly certain that that’s all one would need to fix.

DOING this is going to be another matter. I have Eclipse installed on my work and home machines, and I’ve been working with it a bit it at home while doing the Udemy course; but I suspect it’s going to be a lot more complicated with our crazy GitHub branch system. I did try to follow the Spring Batch/Maven setup directions on the Wiki in our GitHub, but I can’t even get past Step One without being told I don’t have access to create a Maven User Token. No, I don’t know what that is, either, but right now it makes no difference, as I can’t create one.

I’m going to meet with my mentor on Monday, to hopefully figure all this out. The poor man, probably remembering the fiasco that was yesterday, put me off until Monday afternoon–probably sensing I’m going to need a lot of direction. My plan is to read over everything in advance, so I don’t waste his time.

Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the best part of the day. I hosed my new Guidewire 9.0.7 setup–as in, I accidentally DELETED the entire thing! I was attempting to be proactive by zipping up all the old files for 9.0.5 and deleting them, but in so doing I accidentally deleted the wrong files. On a more positive note, I really do have practice now installing a new version, and I even managed to connect the database correctly.