I honestly didn’t expect to have so many issues with this week’s gallery assignment. I totally understood the HTML that we built in class, and could follow all of the granular steps laid out in the JavaScript pseudo-code. Yet when it came time to fill in the JavaScript with actual code, I was at a loss. Sure, I could create a close approximation to what I thought it should look like, but I know that so many things can break code, I was sure I was leaving out critical details. I also found myself missing the instant gratification that Codecademy provides in its exercises: there was no little teal check-mark to tell me I had done something correctly and could move onto the next stage with confidence.

Process and Further Questions

I finally found a resource that helped me work through the structure of the JavaScript. It approached the problem in a slightly different way than we had built using our pseudocode, but it explained each piece of code well enough for me to understand how it worked. Yet, when I plugged that code into my .js file, it still didn’t move the slides! At this point, I wondered if maybe the problem was that the JavaScript wasn’t appropriately linked to my HTML file.

I asked one of our web developers to take a look at my project, and he said that I wasn’t referencing jQuery in my HTML, so he helped me add a line of code.

But I didn’t remember having to link jQuery to the HTML in addition to linking the local JavaScript file. Is this something we have to do when using jQuery in our projects?

Also: are there better/alternative ways of testing JavaScript than pulling up the HTML in a web browser? I’d love to believe that some of my issues stemmed from the browser window not refreshing properly, but I doubt that’s really the case.

On feeling organized

I didn’t. Usually, when I’m writing, I have no problem skipping over a challenging section and returning to it later (in fact, I saved the introductory paragraph for this reflection until the end). But with code, everything feels contingent upon everything else. I’m not yet able to see functions as contained “chunks” separate from one another, and had a hard time creating new sections without finishing previous ones.

My research also felt scattered. It turns out, opening 9 tabs with similar google questions and YouTube videos isn’t a helpful way to work through a coding roadblock.

Because of these issues, I also felt extremely disorganized committing my changes in GitHub. There was so much trial and error going on in the .js file of my project that I was afraid to see what the GitHub history even looked like. By the time I got something to work, I had a hard time articulating the theme of what I had done in order to commit it. Moreover, I can’t even imagine what my complete repo history looks like now—I’m sure I won’t be able to easily retrace my steps. Practice, I guess…