I felt particularly overwhelmed this week. The fact that I started some of the Codecademy lessons for jQuery last week instead of this week might have something to do with it. I’m finding the process extremely frustrating. I’ve been having a lot of problems with Codecademy itself. More often than not I had to go into the Q&A Forum for help. (Which, honestly, was encouraging, because a lot of people were having similar issues to me. For example, having correct code that simply wouldn’t go through.) I understand and appreciate the necessity of Codecademy, but when you’re spending hours upon hours (literally) working on it, it gets frustrating.

The project was… okay. Until I got to the jQuery part. I spent a lot of time on the W3 Schools site, and just googling around in general, but it wasn’t particularly fruitful. As you know, it took me forever. There was a point in class where you said that we might not even need to use variables in our code, and unfortunately I spent a lot of time hung up on that. I’m hoping that I will understand it better once we’re in class. I wish it were possible to do an only jQuery practice before jumping into the whole slideshow. I got the pictures up, the text up, and the buttons up. You just can’t see it all. (I’m also glad to know after reading the other blogposts that my fellow coders in this class are feeling similarly to me.)

For my midterm, I was going to interview the coders behind the “North” piece that I showed you. Unfortunately, that fell through as of two days ago. So. On the prowl again. There are a couple of interactive pieces that I really enjoy and would be interested to speak with the people who produced them, so I am currently trying to get in contact with them.

June 11, 2017
11:09 PM

I was an idiot and did almost all of next week’s jQuery exercises before realizing that I was in fact on the jQuery page and not this week’s JavaScript page. At least now I know why I was so confused. But, needless to say, a dastardly start to this week’s homework.

I learned the abstraction before I even knew I what I was abstracting. I am, however, happy to say that I am now adept at navigating the murky depths of the Codecademy Question Forums. I’m also grateful that now I will understand the “why’s” and “how’s” behind the “what’s” of my mediocre accomplishment. I had no idea how I was supposed to know how to write the beginning JavaScript. But! Now I can use functions. Sort of. So, that’s exciting. Out of frustration and sleepiness, I am going to bed. Thank god I have some time to tackle this tomorrow.

June 12, 2017
7:53 PM

Well. Now I have stuck my toe into the cold lake of JavaScript, and it is not as logical as it seems. I really do feel like I’m drinking out of a fire hose–mostly because I’m building concepts that are built on top of shaky concepts. I’m definitely going to need to review this and ask a bunch of questions on Wednesday. It makes me kind of concerned about going forward, but I also am gaining confidence in my ability to google stuff, which I’m trying to tell myself is all that matters.

The exercises make sense…mostly? But it feels like something finicky is going on with the Codecademy stuff, but I don’t know if it’s just me. For example, I’ll start an exercise and it will say I am wrong before I’ve even clicked anything. It’s frustrating, because then I just have to click through and I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be learning.

I will say, I’m feeling some serious solidarity with my fellow classmates, and that’s encouraging.

This week’s assignments were tough for me. Frustrating. It’s like we went from “Je m’appelle Molly” to translating Victor Hugo. That being said, coding is enjoyable–the actual coding. The logic of learning it is frustrating because it feels just on the verge of intuitive yet isn’t. However, the before and after is fun. I like searching out little issues on the W3 School’s website and figuring them out as I go. There is such a sense of victory when you realize that it was just one tiny misplaced bracket that was standing in the way.

The Ethan Marcotte article on A List Apart put the idea of web design into perspective for me–particularly the transient nature of the beast. Even the simple fact that the article was published seven years ago makes the reader think on all the changes that have happened in the meantime. The way Marcotte compares web design to architecture resonated with me. I love the idea of responsive design–he’s right. There really is something elegant about it.

I’m bookmarking the W3 School page because it looks like something that I’ll be needing in the next couple of weeks. Their format is very helpful to me. Even while I was going through Codecademy I kept thinking “Is there an index somewhere???” and then I stumbled upon this particular web page. I’ve been going through and reading some of them actually as background for the Codecademy assignments! While I worked on my homepage I tried a few things just to see what they would make.

Ditto bookmarking this GitHub page. I know it’s straightforward, but I’m still having some trouble with it. I can’t seem to find things on the desktop version vs. the browser version. I had to make my repository for my homepage in the browser. I don’t think there’s much of a difference? Regardless, this page will be extremely helpful in the future.

First off, I really enjoyed the Codecademy exercises. They are a tad tedious (I’m sure that will increase), but it made a seemingly messy and complicated idea make logical sense. Or, simple sense at least. (My brain isn’t particularly logical.) I’m also glad that I chose to read the articles in order instead of skipping around like I did last week. I liked Mindy McAdams’ piece as it both reiterated what I needed to know from Codecademy and exactly how this process relates back to me–a journalism student. (I’m also not particularly interested to see how Codecademy tackles CSS. I know developers are finicky folks when it comes to the hows of coding, so I’m curious to see how that unfolds.)

OK. The web inspector stuff is mildly blowing my mind. If I’m understanding this correctly it means that I can go on any webpage and then see the code that created it? That’s some crazy talk. Like, I understand that languages like CSS and HTML are totally available to whoever uses them, but don’t huge companies have their own private languages? This has revealed a giant tangled nest of legality questions.

Mostly appreciating this article for the TLDR. Lol. But, also because after the previous article I immediately opened a bunch of webpages and inspected their code. I appreciate being able to now understand what is going on! This seems to be a great learning tool. I can see what it’s SUPPOSED to look like–in it’s cleanest best edited form. I really am curious to delve more into what different code looks like and why. When to use what.

So, is GitHub Flow basically the Slack of GitHub? I’m interested to see–once I actually start creating more branches etc.–if the way they have it set up will be helpful or more confusing to me. It reminds me of being in Video Journalism and having a few different “final” edits of a single video, but rarely making any big changes to the final product. I look forward to learning what is the best practice and why certain branches make it into the master and others don’t. I understand that at my level that the concerns will be fairly cosmetic; however, when a team of great coders are all working together on one project, why do some things make it in and others not? I look forward to class this week!

Codeacademy Profile
GitHub

I am currently sitting at a cafe in Oxford, England–a coincidental place to be learning about the history of the internet and programming languages since it’s the academic home of Tim Berners-Lee.

I’m a big history person, I learn by seeing the whole picture. The timeline pages were particularly helpful to me. I once interviewed a developer at this company called Mobelux, and he explained the basis of the programming to me. The punch cards, plusses and minuses–the positive and negative charges and how they relate to 1s and 0s, and how these very tangible things eventually became digital. He explained the hierarchy of programming languages in layman’s terms for me: the base of C and onward. These readings (and watchings) helped me string all of those ideas together in a more comprehensive way, and overall that is the main thing I learned.

The concept of computational thinking is new to me. But, in a way, it’s like saying that the concept of gravity was new to me in the second grade when I first learned about it. I particularly look forward to pondering it more so that the how’s of it become more settled in my head. Right now, it reminds of a wind-up toy that’s been given a task and we have to figure out what the task is and how much to wind up the toy so it can complete the task. I also enjoyed your blog post on the evolution of the how’s of thinking as opposed to the what’s. It is an infinite and ever-evolving thing. (It made me wonder if there’s any sort of predictable pattern that could be identified in history? Then I read your second post. I appreciated the everyday examples by Kim Pearson. I am NOT a math person, but I greatly appreciate math in this way. The labeling and identification of patterns. I enjoy discussing it, but I’m hopeless at identifying them myself!)

My main goals for this class?

1. Learn how to do this so that I can be one of the more marketable content-producing Millennials.
2. Be able to hold a work-related conversation with my brother-in-law (a coder) and know what’s going on.
3. Be able to watch an episode of Silicon Valley and be able to understand more than the general stereotypes as described to me by my aforementioned California-based brother-in-law.
4. Go back to my old Neopets account and blow my ancient HTML out of the water.

I like thinking about stuff in the abstract. Specifics are sometimes beyond. I hope that this class doesn’t make me pull out too much of my hair. Regardless, I look forward to next week.

My GitHub. (Hopefully by the time you view this my profile pic will have updated.)