An Uphill Battle

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It is no secret that the gallery assignment was a tough one. The entire class — not an exaggeration — struggled with completing it. So what is the gallery assignment, anyway? Our class was tasked with creating a homepage (easy-peasy) that contained a slideshow of photos (not so easy-peasy). The HTML portion of this assignment was like a walk in the park. A few brackets here, a heading there, and throw some divs in the mix — you’re good to go. The CSS was a little tougher. Figuring out the exact numbers I need for “top” & “width” (what the heck is auto??) & trying to decide if my position should be relative or absolute probably took me a solid two hours. But, CSS turned out to be no match for the evil-two-headed-monster that is JavaScript & jQuery. Missing class didn’t help, but I think even if I were there I would have still had issues. Dollar signs, squiggly brackets, and commands that didn’t make sense to my human brain — all hope felt lost.

I tried, tried, and tried again to understand how to make it work. The internet was helpful, but also confusing. Every source had a different way of doing a slideshow, so there were no basic commands I could turn to. I was plugging and chugging in different things from W3 schools, Youtube, Wired, and some smaller sketchier sites. I spent hours trying to make it make sense. I left and came back. Still nothing. I left again and came back again, and still nothing.

It just didn’t work.

So how does my tale end? I eventually gave up. I plugged in an automatic slideshow from W3 schools and begged for forgiveness in the /* comments */. It wasn’t a proud moment.

Still, all was not lost. We took the time in the class period following the assignment to really dive into how to do it. All was explained, untangled, unmangled, and demystified. For now, the battle was won and our men could return home.

But, whispers lingered in the air of a more terrifying conquest looming in the near distance. The natives call it: “A whole entire website, like seriously.” I fear what is to come, will my men survive?

It’s Almost Midterm Season

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I missed most of the class this past week, so I don’t have much to say on that end. Based on what my peers have told me, the gallery assignment is a little daunting I even got told: “for real though you should try not to miss that class [redacted] is hard.” Ha. So I will do my best to attend every class for the remainder of the semester. (I will be in California on Oct. 4, but we can discuss that at another time).

Anyway, I will talk about my midterm project now. I did an interview with Brittany Ohalete, a senior in the school of engineering. We share a mutual friend, which worked out so perfectly. Brittany Ohalete is unique because she is an artist and a developer. She has a pretty popular graphic design business — called BOPHO — where she creates custom logos, event/party flyers, Snapchat filters, CD cover art, and more. On the other end, she is a full-stack developer. (Sidebar: it’s pretty cool that I even know what that means now.) She fluent in about 6 or 7 programming languages and loves to learn new ones as well as developing frameworks. I’ll end it here, as not to ruin the actual project.

I have written a little over half of it now. My next steps are to finish it — duh. Edit, rearrange, make things more concise, tighten up quotes etc. etc. I don’t really know the direction I am going with this profile, though. It feels as if I am just rambling. I think I need to figure out my hook and how to move the story to a natural progression. When I read profile articles from The Guardian or The New York Times there’s always a very strong hook. All the material is there, I just need to find a better way to organize it.

J-what?

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jQuery made CSS and HTML look like a cake-walk. Managing the organization of my syntax in jQuery was my biggest struggle. I would get confused on where to put my semi-colons or brackets. It was helpful that Codecademy highlights the matching pairs when you select one of the parentheses or brackets. I had no issues targeting classes and ids. I still don’t have a clear understanding on how “next( )” and “closest( )” work, but with practice, I will recognize their purpose and see the correlation. It was also overwhelming learning all these new tags. HTML doesn’t have as many abbreviations to remember unlike CSS and jQuery. Through jQuery, I was able to get an inside look on how simple tasks like making a button rotate, a list drop down, or a picture to toggle are done. On a website it looks so simple, yet behind closed doors you have to target select a class and then add a specific characteristic to it. It was cool to know you could directly use CSS in jQuery because in my opinion, it saves time. Instead of going back and forth between your CSS page and JavaScript, you can easily make changes right there.

Aside from my troubles with the coding itself, I found jQuery to be interesting because it really made the website come together. In metaphorical terms, CSS would be the icing and jQuery would be the sprinkles. There’s a lot that goes into a website and the more detail you add, the more coding you have to do. As a Film major, I mostly use Adobe Premiere to edit videos, but if I want to add extra animations to enhance it then I pull the project into Adobe AfterEffects. Similar to jQuery it adds to the project and you watch it come alive.

Tough Week at the Office

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This week was not fun. Coming off of last week, which was the beginning of the JavaScript learning, I was anxious to be able to add a new kind of code to my work. The Codecademy assignments, at first didn’t feel to difficult but definitely started to pick up compared to html and css. However, the main difference when it comes to all 3 coding languages we’ve learned, was JavaScript was significantly more difficult to apply than the other two. I had little to no difficulties applying the Codecademy lessons to the assignments we had in the beginning.

With this gallery though, there felt like there was no end in sight. I sat down on Monday and figured out out my html that was already started in class, add the css aspects of the code and after about 45 minutes in my confident was pretty high. I thought to myself “hey look at me, coding, nice.” Little did I know this confidence and enthusiasm would soon fade.

I first took a look at what we had done in class and tried to use that as a base to move forward. The problem being that I really had no idea where I was trying to go. I got the gist of the assignment, hide some photos, press a button, the photo shows up with a new caption, going back and forth back and forth. The buttons weren’t too hard and neither was adding the images. It’s when it came to hiding the photos and having the captions show up I had difficulties. I tried to go on YouTube and watch videos that would show me how to get where I wanted to be. I, without any hyperbole, watched different Youtube videos for 2 hours on Monday night looking for guidance. I even texted 2 different classmates to see if they had any idea. What was funny was when they told me they were going to text me for help. That’s when I figured this may not come out the way I wanted. All in all, it was a good to experience the struggle for now I must guide myself until it all comes together.

jQuery + ONA = inspiration.

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jQuery was a relief for me. Last week, I struggled with JavaScript. I was, as the kids say, shook. It felt like high school math class all over again. I should’ve known that those tricky little web developers, the same guys who follow the DRY principle, wouldn’t leave it at that. Once I got out of my head and got a hang of it, I realized it wasn’t that bad, but it can still be shortened.

Enter jQuery. A fast, small and feature-rich library designed to make JavaScript easier. Also, the beginning of creating code I can see utilized in the websites I actually visit. I felt like I was doing something big once I saw all the interactive features, like sliding elements and toggles.

At the time that I finished the jQuery lessons, I had just come back from the Online News Association (ONA) Conference on the HBCU Digital Media Fellowship. At their annual Online Journalism Awards, I saw a world of new possibilities. The student category particularly surprised me. Seeing the websites for Aftermath by UNC School of Media and Journalism and Alone by Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism made me realize that there is more out there than just words-on-paper journalism. These pieces create experiences that put the audience in the shoes of the afflicted. This, along with the design thinking workshops and training in alternative storytelling methods by Michael Grant, made me realize the untapped potential in Howard’s journalism department, the audience’s role in the story and the possibility that we may be behind the curve.

How do we bring a comparable curriculum to our HBCU? I think this class is a step in the right direction. I think Howard needs a modern journalism curriculum that strays from the traditional.

But back to jQuery. It was easy to grasp and it was intuitive. I believe that’s also what contributes to a good story. The audience can understand and interact with it. I will say I’m inspired. I want to take my new insight back to our school’s new ONA chapter.

¿Por(J)Que(ry)?

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Coming into the lessons on Codecademy it was interesting to know that Javascript was the most popular programming language. HTML and CSS felt easier than Javascript. I started to think maybe this is just the hard part and it will get a bit easier. However, jQuery came along and has made it a bit more tough. It is a bit tough because it is like equations that I’m not use too. Learning different elements of the equation piece by piece has been a struggle. I have not given up though, relying on consistent practice and going back to the different Codecademy assignments has helped. jQuery isn’t necessarily easy, but understanding what I’m actually doing to the website does help. It not easy to exactly remember what signs and syntax to use to execute, but I at least have a basic understanding of jQuery. The most difficult part that has come with coding is remembering most of the functions. It’s not necessarily knowing where the comment goes and nuances like that, but rather, what was it I was trying to add. I understand that cheat sheets are made and that is what most people use, however I still want to be able to actually point out the change I’m trying to make and accurately implement that into my website. Just more practice and perhaps outside reading will aid my learning.

The Genius of jQuery

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So up to this point, I understood that everything had its place on a separate file. It’s kinda like how people in the different schools stick to each other. But here we are as journalism majors, taking a very computer science-y class. We’re bridging that gap and putting our different skillsets together in order further our journey into the coding world.

I think learning jQuery after being introduced to HTML, CSS, and Javascript is much like our figurative bridge we made between journalism and web development. jQuery makes it easy for developers to target HTML elements and make them interactive. Much like the hierarchy system in HTML, the Document Object Model (DOM) is set up like a family tree. We can even refer to elements as parents, children, and grandchildren of another element within the code.In addition to targeting elements by familial relationship, we can target them by closeness to a current element. Another pretty cool function is the find method. This is a way to target a singular method out of a group of descendants to an element.

Going into this week, I was pretty nervous about learning something new. JavaScript kinda killed my confidence, but jQuery helped me redeem myself. I understood the concepts and caught onto the coding formats pretty quickly. I’ve also come to realize it’s much better to at least grasp the concepts rather than just be able to regurgitate out code.

 

The jig is up.

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Oh, JavaScript. The most popular programming language.

With HTML and CSS, I felt comfortable. I thought I’d be able to conquer anything. Everything was a breeze. Coding wasn’t that bad, after all.

Until it was.

I felt like I was in math class all over again. I was reliving my worst nightmare. The last two lessons almost defeated me. But just like math class, I realized that I just had to practice to prevail.

At first, I was really confused as to what JavaScript did. Why were we adding numbers and doing true/false equations? What was all the craze? Could I not do these things with my calculator? I slowly began to realize that the adding and subtracting, were just the foundation for larger functions, like creating widgets, games and apps. And just like in math class, if you mess up the basics, the whole equation will come tumbling down. Needless to say, I’ll be revisiting the lessons.

The hardest thing for me was remembering the syntax and all of the necessary elements of a function. After Tuesday’s online class, though, I was reassured in knowing that no one fully memorizes everything in JavaScript. I’ll just have to make a (or find) cheat sheet.

Another thing that baffled me in the Codecademy lessons, specifically, was that the system would sometimes return a syntax error, but I’d still get a check in the box. I found myself restarting the lessons over and over, trying to note the differences between what I typed and what Codecademy wanted.

One good thing, though, is that I fully understand what jQuery is used for. I think whoever wrote that library is brilliant. I also think that I will eventually be able to fully grasp JavaScript. It’s just a matter of time and practice. As I reflect now, I realize that I wasn’t struggling as much as I thought I was. It was a lot of material, but nothing I can’t handle.

A Little (j)Querious

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jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to add dynamic behavior to HTML elements. Libraries in the JavaScript community are collaborative collections that extend and ease the use of the programming language. For example, jQuery can do the same function as twelve lines of JavaScript in just three. A good analogy to better understand jQuery comes from Codecademy. You can think of JavaScript like a bunch of individual Lego pieces, all the necessary tools to build grand things are there — it just might take a long time. Well, jQuery is like pre-made building tools. So instead of using individual Legos to build a car to put in your town, jQuery is just the car ready to be placed in the larger scheme of what you are building.

While I’m learning these new programming languages, it’s interesting to compare how these are similar to the language (or languages) we speak everyday. So this has me ponder: what in the English Language could be analogous to jQuery? What comes to mind first are contractions for words. Instead of cannot or do not or I have we instead use can’t and don’t and I’ve. These remind me of jQuery because in place of using the individual words to help portray our ideas, we insert pre-packaged words that still get across our point without using so many characters or in most cases combining two words. In both instances, conciseness is key. Lengthy, wordy, and down-right redundant speech is pushed aside for the brief yet comprehensive.

Approaching these programming languages from a linguistic point of view really helps in my understanding of these new concepts. Stepping back and looking at new concepts from a lens in which you are comfortable with is essential to learning. Many things in this universe are connected. There’s certain patterns that exist across species, languages, science, and math. I guess this all goes to say, you’ve always been aware.

JavaScript is…

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JavaScript is a the coding language that allows detail to your HTML, similar to CSS but more details. JavaScript is the mostly used language and makes up a huge section of web development. When working with JavaScript, I knew it would become very complex and very out of my box, being that I am a beginner. I did become frustrated with it, being that it has so much detail, but once I continued to stick with it, it became easier. I never thought that I would actually learning how to code, although this is still a new concept to me. I really wonder if I will continue with this or just learn the basics. I would love to keep up with this skill, but I am also asking if this is truly for me and something that I want to be apart of my life. It is still early and I think I have time to discover this. But I do see how all of the languages are coming together to work together.