Green Code

Rookie WebDev trying not to break the internet...

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

Practicing Agile workflow with 16 front-end engineers....

So... building a functioning web application is very hard... let me just start with that.  I have built a few in my limited experience and been for the most part successful...  This past week my cohort and I here at The Iron Yard were tasked with building a quiz application.  Doesn't sound too overwhelming right?  Now lets have 16 different people build this thing that must work and must look good...  The technical piece, getting everything to work and appear as expected, is a challenge but even more so is coordinating this process with many different people who all think differently and perhaps have  different definitions of a successful app/component.  

Day one I was extremely frustrated and disappointed in myself.  I was assigned a fairly challenging piece of the application and for about the first day I vaguely understood what the requirements were of this piece and what I needed to do to go about constructing it.  In order to properly test whether or not my component was actually working I needed to have some data to feed into, of which there was none, I also needed to receive some type of input from the user, of which I was not sure where in the process the user would input that information.  So needless to say, by the end of day one I felt totally useless and like a complete failure.

However, after our ‘scrum meeting’ on day 2 I had a much clearer picture of what needed to happen and I was able to work through some very difficult technical challenges that afternoon.  I am so glad that my instructor challenged me to take on a tough problem and didn’t let me off the hook, because I learned quite a lot during the process of solving the problems that needed to be solved.

In retrospect the day one disaster was partially a fault of poor organization on our groups part, but more than any the ‘git blame’ lay on me.  I did not ask the right questions to make sure I understood the requirements of my component and I did not plan more before jumping into fruitless coding.  Laying the ground work for the project on day one would have made my life a whole lot easier and ultimately that all boiled done to better communication with my team.

I am very thankful to have the learning opportunity of working in a large group, because there will be many times in my professional life (probably most of the time) where I will not be working in a vacuum and will have to be able to communicate, and ask the right questions.

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

Surviving my first Hackathon :-0

I just spent the past 4 days doing nothing but coding... which by itself is crazy!  Javascript is really hard!  However, I wasn’t just in a room by myself focused on a project I was working in a team committing to a single repository(scariest words you will ever see on your screen: merge conflict), implementing a new technology I barely understood for the first time and connecting my front end of the web stack to the backend of the stack, which was created by a team mate (something I had also never done before).  This was one of the toughest weekends I have ever had.  Spending 12+ hours a day for four days coding, taking a short break to see my family and eat.  It did not mater that I was tired or frustrated... stuff had to get done so I had to suck it up and push through... Not just for myself but for my team mates as well.  I am tired to say the least, oh yeah, and we still had lecture and assignments the following Monday!  While this was one of the hardest 4 days of my life I still had fun.  I was lucky to be paired with a great team of smart people who were eager to work as hard as I was.  We battled in the trenches until we had a product we could be proud of!  (The last thing I wanted to do was stand up on Monday to demo what we had worked so hard on and not be able to be proud of what we were showing people)  I think the best way to describe a hackathon is trial by fire.... you are going to run into very difficult problems that you may not know how to solve but the true test, at least in my mind, is what you did with the challenge.  I could have given up or blamed others for things not working or even cried.... or push through until a solution is met and use the experience to grow.  I am thankful that I am mature enough now and motivated enough to do the latter (I can’t say that this was always the case).  While I am not eager to do another one of these anytime soon I am so glad for the experience!  It was absolutely worth it! So whats next?  Oh yeah, drop the tech we just worked so hard to learn and pick up React!

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

Backbone.js - Lost in translation...

So we are over half way through week 5 here at The Iron Yard… and up to this point I was feeling pretty good, then we started learning about the Backbone library… Yeah, so the first couple of days we focused on routers, models, and collections and I was sort of able to work my way through these concepts, complete the homework and even complete the extra challenges.  Then there was today and we are introduced to views, as in, I am traveling in a tour group in a foreign country and I lost ‘view’ of the rest of the group and now I am completely and utterly lost…. So a few posts ago I talked about being humbled, this dev just got humbled!  So much so that today looking at my code and looking at examples I felt like I was reading a foreign language for the first time.  Some of the stuff I was looking at I felt like I had already gotten a grasp of!  My brain was spinning so much (still is as I write this post) that I just couldn’t process what I was even looking at.  I think completely overwhelmed is the right description… so I battled through it got my project working, but do I really understand what I did or how it is working… NO, not really, thankfully there is always tomorrow and I refuse to give up so I will beat this thing!  Maybe just not as quickly or efficiently as I would like.

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

What is this is?

Sooooo much confusion over such a simple word.  To the best of my shallow grasp this refers to the object that a method or function is being called upon.  Typically you call it in this form - object.method(); in the method block the key word this would refer to the object from our model. yeah…. Confused yet? :)  To make it a little more murky lets talk about the .apply() method. Now you can use this for any non-method function, the first argument identified in apply(arg1) is now explicitly the this object being referenced in the function that apply is being called upon. ex— function.apply(arg1); To take it a step further, any other arguments included after arg1 are treated as arguments for the function – function.apply(arg1, arg2, arg3);  Again arg1 one is treated as the this object regardless of type, so it could be a string, number, object, array.  arg2 & arg3 are passed on the function as arguments, if the function calls for three and only two are passed through apply then the third argument will be undefined.  Probably a little more in-depth and confusing than you cared to read but… there you go!  My very basic understanding of the this object in javascript.

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

The Iron Yard: Front End -- 3 weeks in

I have been a student in The Iron Yard front end program now for 3 weeks.  It has ben a whirlwind of talking, reading, practicing, learning, and fighting toward becoming a capable software developer.  While I have no formal experience in any tech field prior to my entry into The Iron Yard, I know I have made the right choice.  I am confident now after 3 weeks that I will have the tools I need to make this huge transition from high school history teacher to front end web developer.  Full disclosure, I was very nervous about this decision and  I probably still am.  I do have a wife and child and doing anything that brings into question my paycheck is a scary thing.  With that said, I am so happy that I did.  I have learned so much already at the three week point.  I feel myself being pushed and challenged not only to solve tough problems with my code but I am being pushed to write better, smarter code.  I have heard many people, some very accomplished developers, talk about the imposter syndrome and the fact that it sits in the back of your mind no matter how much success you have in this field.  I have to say, I believe it whole heartedly because I think about how much great information I have learned in three weeks, then I think about how much I still don’t know.  The great news is I feel like I am building up the skill set to be able to continue learning throughout my career, which I have come to find is extremely important in this field.  Tech is always changing, there is always a new framework or tool that an employer is going to want you to know how to use.  I think one of my biggest worries about doing this, was whether or not I really belonged.  For anyone considering taking this chance my advice is be sure this is really what you want to do.  To quote my instructor, ‘This stuff is hard’, I am paraphrasing a little :).  You need to love this if you really want to do it because it is challenging.  I would also advise you check your ego at the door, if you cannot handle being humbled this definitely is not the right thing for you.  There is always a piece you don’t know very well, there is always someone else a little smarter, or more experienced than you.  I am not saying don’t be confident, but don’t be afraid to fail either.  I think of it a lot like baseball.  The majority of the time you are going to strikeout or pop up but that one time you hit a home run.... Oh euphoria, can’t get any better than when you actually break through the wall and get that code working the way you want it to!

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

Arrays/Objects

Arrays are used for storing multiple pieces of information in one variable.  i.e(var myArray = [1,’two’, 3];.  Notice that I am able to mix types within myArray.  If I wanted to access element number 3 I would enter myArray[2];.  Thats right, [2] accesses the 3rd element because arrays start from 0 instead of 1.  Objects behave much the same way, however, in an object I am able to give each element a key name or reference name.  For example, var jon = {name: “Jon Smith”, age: 25, is-awesome: true};  Again, like an Array, with an Object you are able to store different types of data in the same place.  If I wanted to ask the object how old Jon is I would type jon.age; and I would get back 25.  I can also store Arrays and Objects within other Arrays or objects.  If I wanted to create user information or profile information I might create an object and include keys for name, age, level of subscription, passwords etc.  Arrays can be used to do the same.

[rookiequarterbackcoder-blog]

HTML/CSS selectors

So as a very green coder I am slowly trying to learn the specific properties within different elements of HTML/CSS.  I will talk about some of the differences I see between tags, classes, and ids.  

If I want to make sweeping changes over my whole page I would simply use tags in my CSS.  For instance if i wanted every <p></p> to have the same font, color, size, etc.  I would simply type in p{} and style in my CSS and all tags with <p> will receive that styling.  

If I wanted to set certain boxes across my page but not all boxes I might identify those boxes as a class so that when I call that .class in CSS all those boxes would receive that styling but not the ones in different classes.

Finally if I knew I had only one button, lets say I create a complete purchase button, I could identify this button with and id so that when I use #id only that one specific button will take those style changes.