w3schools – WildKnitter Codes

Work Day 27: Continuing Ed…

…or, attempting to remember my JavaScript.

Today we had our first in-depth continuing ed session with our Code Academy instructor. He’s going forward with more JavaScript instruction, but he’s introducing us to Object-Oriented programming concepts which we can hopefully apply to our respective language quagmires. I was skeptical at first, but JavaScript OOP does seem to be similar to Java and Gosu OOP. My only beef is that, doing this via Skype, I couldn’t see our instructor’s double-display very well on my work monitors. He was demonstrating running different jobs, which I couldn’t see, while I was frantically trying to remember HOW (I finally remembered to “NPM Install”—DUH). It looks like I’m going to have a lot of W3 School reviewing to do to fully understand everything. I may just work from home on class days from now on—I have a large monitor that SMOKES my work ones. Also, there will be less background noise to contend with. Today, near my cube there was some sort of meet-and-greet going on that was getting rather loud.

Fun fact: There IS a difference between a code inspection and a code review! The code inspection is actually a function in Guidewire (Menu—Analyze—>Inspect Code…). I did this and managed to uncover some issues that had nothing to do with my changes. One issue had to do with PCF methods that really should be classes—this is more of a tech debt issue. We won’t mention the fact that <code> in a PCF should be separate, anyway. It’s the same blasphemy as having inline code in HTML. As my elderly Uncle Jim used to say, “It just isn’t DONE!” I asked about the errors, and our Tech Lead explained that I should just include screenshots with some notes explaining my findings, and let the code reviewer determine what is and isn’t an issue. I think this is the Tech Lead equivalent of “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing!” Although our Tech Lead is a woman and very nice, so I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that…I think…

The good news is that my boss, who was on copy for the code review request, is ecstatic that I’ve actually done some real work, as opposed to peering at documentation, doing exercises, and falling asleep in front of Pluralsight videos.

Work Day 10: No matter what job you have…

There’s no escaping bureaucracy.

In the continuing saga of getting up to speed, I found out that, yes, I was completely correct about the git config command I need to enter to accomodate large file names. However…I can’t do any config commands because I don’t have admin rights to my laptop. I went onto our tech support site to put in a ticket for this, and found out that my laptop is STILL under the name of the tech who built it. The guy who deployed it has no idea why it would still be in the build guy’s name. He suggested I wait until Monday and try again, when perhaps the system will have caught up and actually show that I am the user of MY OWN LAPTOP. Also, my manager is out until Monday, and I really didn’t want to explain to his Friday stand-in why I’m requesting admin rights to a laptop that, apparently, is not under my name.

Oh, and I’m also waiting for the docking station. The deployment guy ordered it and is waiting for it to come in. This means I’m still using the laptop without the dual work monitors, which can be tricky when one is doing things where two screens are much easier.

I’ve managed to make it through the w3schools site and SoloLearn for Java. I’m still wading through the Pluralsight videos. I’m liking the Udemy class, but I’m having a bit of a challenge trying to find time in my (now) busy personal life to fit this in. I’m pondering letting some things go that really don’t apply anymore. I really want to be successful as a developer, and I’m not going to be able to do that if I have to deal with other things in my life that keep me from learning what I need to or from doing my coding practice. Unfortunately, people just see that I’m out of formal training now and that I should be available for anything.

I am, of course, ALWAYS available for knitting and crocheting!

Work Day 8: Almost…

Okay, I may have spoken too soon…There’s been a slight snag in the procurement of my new laptop. The tech support guy planned to copy over the data from my old hunk of junk to my new laptop. I have most things on my personal drive on the network, but I do have some things on my laptop for immediate use (in the event that something goes awry with network access). This was supposed to take no time at all, but the transfer failed. Come to find out, I was supposed to be signed out of Outlook. Sure…a corporate worker not on email for ANY length of time… HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

After I finished laughing hysterically, we arranged for him to give this another shot tomorrow morning. I’m going down to the tech area, so that if he needs to physically access my laptop to do this, he can.

In the meantime, staring at videos isn’t cutting it for me, nor is typing along to said videos. I’ve already gone through the w3schools exercises, and I’m almost through SoloLearn–the object/class thing isn’t really sinking in yet. SO…I found a course out on Udemy.com for programming with Java and Eclipse. As a first time Udemy subscriber, I got this at a steal. I’m going to go through this on my home laptop–It took a good hour, but I finally got Java installed. I had a slight issue in that I needed to add the path to the Environment Variables, but once I did that, the application worked fine. This course has a series of exercises, which I think will be more beneficial for me. I figure between this and https://codingbat.com/java I should have this down eventually.

I truly hope to do SOMETHING to justify my paycheck soon. Otherwise, my coworkers are going to start mistaking me for a houseplant and try to water me…

Work Day 3: Waiting…

I looked up the status on my laptop through our tech site, and it’s apparently 17.62% complete. That’s a slight improvement over the 14.48% it was at yesterday.

More Pluralsight today. Fun times. The good news is that The Alum pointed me in the direction of Simon Allardice’s video “What is Programming?” We did view this one for our Code Academy pre-work, but she reminded me that there is a section on object-oriented programming. It did help me to better understand the quagmire that is Classes, Objects, etc. for Java. I peaked ahead on W3 Schools, and apparently there are also “packages” but I’m trying not to think about that right now…

I’ve also been looking at our enterprise GitHub to better understand the code. May we pause here to say that our application code is NOTHING like the tiny bit of code for the classroom assignments. By that, I mean if you decided to print out our GitHub, you’d probably take out the forest for an entire state, and that’s for ONE repository. There are several repos for our application. I couldn’t tell you how all this code interacts and relates to the site. In an effort to make some sense of it, I’ve been taking past user stories for our Agile team and trying to reverse engineer them, to see what was changed. The simplest one I’ve found so far was changed in two jobs—most changes involve at least four jobs. I think, once I get my laptop and can set up my environment, I’m going to need to have someone walk me through the code, to explain how it’s working.

From what I can figure out so far, the code appears to be aligned with the major sections of the application—natch. The repos appear to be aligned to the database groups/schemas. I’m familiar with those, as I’ve done lots of database-querying as a BA. What I may do next is to get out the data mapping documents to see if I can align the field names with the fields in the application.

Tomorrow is my big presentation. I’m going to be showing my mentor, The Alum, and my manager my final project from class. Needless to say, I’m going to need to bring in my own home computer…I suspect that running a client and server on my present work machine would be…less than successful…

Work Day 2: This is Taz…

…he’s currently more useful than I am. At least he can sharpen pencils.

I met with my Mentor today over Skype, where he got a firsthand look at how SLOW my current work laptop is. He quickly decided that I’m better off reviewing documentation, becoming familiar with our company GitHub, exploring other links, reviewing the code, and doing tutorials until my new laptop comes in. So, I did all that today. I continued reviewing the Pluralsight video and W3 Schools for Java…until they got to the part about “objects,” “classes,” “constructors,” etc. That sonic boom you heard clear across the cosmos was my head exploding.

HEH???

My plan is to go over all that again tomorrow, and hope that overnight, while I sleep, tiny elves implant understanding in my brain, because I have NO IDEA what the hell it all means.

Work Day 1: It’s a miracle…

…I remembered where I sit!

I need to rethink this blog post numbering system. Otherwise, we’re going to be up to Work Day #5,432…

My big return today from Code Academy to my department was sort of an anti-climax. I got there around 7:30 a.m. and hardly anyone was in yet. As several people were either working from home or off on PTO, not many more showed up. After three months in a classroom with 15 other people, it was entirely too quiet! Also, in my absence, the cubicle elves apparently decided to give us higher walls, so I couldn’t even tell at first if ANYONE was in the office.

The good news is that my laptop request is approved and will be built once the machine comes in. My mentor—and, in the interest of anonymity I’ll just call the Code Academy alum helping me with my setup as “the Alum”—recommended some documentation and Pluralsight Java tutorials until my new laptop arrives…I’m supplementing this with w3schools.com. Our instructor is going to set up training when we start meeting for our ongoing education, but that’s weeks from now. I want to get up and running as soon as possible with Java. I’m also going to have to learn Gosu.

I’m meeting with my mentor tomorrow to see if there’s ANYTHING I can with my current laptop—short of tossing it out the window.

Day 62: Achoo!

I have a cold.

It was only a matter of time. We’ve all been cooped up in a classroom in the basement of our building for three months now. Several people have been sick over the course of our bootcamp. I’m just happy I never caught whatever that one guy had that caused him to stay home due to vomiting. I’m currently chugalugging Theraflu, hoping to stave off the worst of this. I’d just as soon NOT show up at my old department/new job next Monday morning with the Bubonic Plague. It could bring down the mood…

We spent most of today doing self-study “new hire” online trainings. We’re allowed to skip over some topics we might already be familiar with…things like “How to Fill Out a Timesheet.” Other topics are a bit more relevant. This, in turn, was punctuated with guest speakers. I have to say I was especially appreciative of the IT educational resources speaker. We now have a license through the company for Pluralsight. I’ve joked before about how I don’t get much out of just watching coding videos, but I think the combination of this and W3 Schools should help. My goal, going forward, is to learn Java.

I’m also trying to figure out how to keep my JavaScript/Node.js knowledge fresh, as I’m not going to be using it for my everyday work. One thing I thought of was to perhaps finish the server we started for the final project. We only built it out far enough for our required site pages. Over the years, I’ve seen too many developer friends let their skills go stale because they got complacent in their jobs—I don’t want that to happen to me.

On a cheerier note, I’ve been in touch with my manager. He’s got someone preparing a transition plan for me—It’s my coworker who has also been through Code Academy! That should be a plus. She should have an idea of where the gaps are, and what accesses and additional training I’ll need.

I just hope I remember where I sit…

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 9: First Project Done!

After much sturm und drang, I FINALLY competed my first website assignment! Of course, there’s no data or JavaScript behind the site yet (except for the small amount I did for the “optional” login code), but it’s looking good so far! It took me ages to hunt down and correct all my capitalization errors. I had the presence of mind to check my page on my cell phone, which is how I discovered I STILL had one more picture that wasn’t rendering on the “About Page” due to the jpg file name having ONE capital letter. One damned capital letter…I mean, really, how could I foul up this one???

I finally have a breather for now. We have some work to do to prepare for our upcoming JavaScript training which starts on Monday, but nothing like the insanity of the past two weeks—drinking from a spewing fire hydrant would have been easier. To prepare for Monday, we need to review the w3schools.com JavaScript section, and we have some Pluralsight videos to go through. I really hate to admit it, but the Pluralsight videos do nothing for me. I know they’re supposed to be an easy way to disseminate information to us as a warm-up for training, but I find I get more from the w3schools site. I tried watching the videos in class this afternoon and almost went to sleep—in fact, I’m pretty sure I did black out at one point.

At first I thought it was my age, and the fact that I prefer a live person vs. Memorex instructing me (only people of a certain age will get this), but then I had to remember that I have NO issue watching hours upon hours worth of YouTube footage featuring how-to clips for the Kitchener stitch, continental knitting, short rows, tunisian crocheting, or (God help me) spinning. My one pathetic attempt at a spinning class really needs to be an upcoming blog entry. It’s the one fiber-related craft at which I’m a abject, dismal failure.

But I digress…must go get my beauty sleep before class tomorrow. Perhaps I should watch a JavaScript training video to help me nod off…

One week out

…I have seven days to get my **** together.

This evening, I’ve been watching TV while furtively going over JavaScript, and other pre-work I’m going to need to review before class begins next week. HTML and CSS were fairly easy for me to grasp, although I do confess that I bookmarked RGB Colorcode, as honestly if you held a loaded gun to my head I couldn’t tell you which codes constitute which colors.

The thing that’s so confusing to me about JavaScript is the fact that the equations are different from what one would expect. I ask you:

x == y, rather than x = y

Heh???

I do understand the explanation about why this is so (one is populating a variable), but after a whole lifetime of understanding x = y, it’s this sort of thing that’s making my head explode–and this is only one arithmetic equation that’s just plan WEIRD. If you don’t code and I tell you about the rest of the oddball arithmetic, you’ll run screaming into the night, so I’ll spare you…

Thank heavens for W3 Schools! If you don’t know about this site, it’s THE go-to site for learning all things coding. They have an awesome reference section, and a few ways to test your knowledge. The pre-work our instructors assigned consisted of several Pluralsight courses cobbled together. I’ve been using W3 Schools to supplement my learning. When I mentioned this in my interview for the program, they were impressed that I’d sought out additional resources. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that it was dumb luck and Bing, coupled with desperation, that led me to W3 Schools. I also found a cool app called SoloLearn which has also helped out greatly. One of best ways I learn is to quiz myself over and over again, and these two tools allow me to do that.

Now, if I can only figure out a way to fit in more review time before next week. There are, shall we say, DISTRACTIONS…