As I was working through this week’s Codecademy lessons on jQuery, I felt a minor sense of relief because I seemed to be understanding the concepts more easily, especially when compared to last week’s JavaScript disaster. Applying the jQuery concepts, however, has been a different story.

After completing the Codecademy jQuery exercises and working on some further tweaking of my existing homepage HTML and CSS code on Friday evening, I decided to get away from my apartment and head to Georgetown’s main campus on Saturday afternoon, hoping that the jQuery gods would help me complete the slideshow assignment. Five hours later, I felt like I had little to show for my efforts. Numerous Google searches and perusing the pages of more than 10 different sites only left me even more confused. I reached out to Greg for assistance. His response to write out the required steps in the slideshow using code comments was helpful, but I guess I’m just unsure of where to go from here. I found what I thought was a useful source for building a jQuery slideshow, but even modeling my code after this example has not worked. I then proceeded to create an account on Stack Overflow and asked the same question there–how do I get started on creating a jQuery slideshow with captions that show/hide? I received a detailed response, and tried altering my code, but it still did not work. My GitHub repo for this assignment is here. If anyone has figured out the jQuery code, I’d love to chat!

I’m not one to give up on an assignment. It’s currently after 9:00 on Sunday evening, and with a full-time 8-5 job and then a 6-9:35 pm class to attend on Monday, I’m unable to dedicate any additional time to this before the 10:00 deadline on Monday night. You win [for now], jQuery. I will try to work on the slideshow again on Tuesday evening to get it working before Wednesday’s class. I’m hoping this week’s class will shed some light on the steps we should follow to make a slideshow. I think what would be most helpful for me would be to see a template of sorts that shows the correct code to use in order to get all images (except for the current one) to hide, to click through to the next image using a button, and to add the caption text that also shows and hides.

I’m excited to work on the developer profile midterm assignment. After working so hard to figure out the jQuery assignment and still reaching a dead end, I’m grateful for the opportunity to work on a written piece that is more straightforward. The developer I’m profiling is named Dave. He’s asked me to withhold his last name for privacy reasons due to the work he does as a government contractor. Dave is a developer and programmer who does front-end design for applications that provide analytics as well as freelance marketing and landing page-type work. I got in touch with Dave through my colleague who works on social media and analytics for my department at Georgetown. As I was discussing this assignment with her, she offered to put me in touch with Dave, who is a friend of her tech app startup-owner boyfriend. I’ve already spoken with Dave and have received answers to the questions I posed, so I’m looking forward to working his answers into the midterm assignment. I reviewed the developer profile examples from the 2013 class, and am wondering what exactly is expected for this assignment. Some people provided a brief overview of the person they profiled, and then simply listed out the questions and answers. A few others worked the questions and answers into an actual story (I’m assuming these were the journalism students). Do you have a preference, Greg, for how we approach this assignment?