Trying Something New
Why?
In my head I tell myself all of these really positive outcomes for doing this. It’s going to keep me on a forward trajectory! If I publicly say I’m doing something or am going to do something I’ll be more likely to follow through. This will keep me motivated and accountable! It’ll help me stay immersed in the Web Development community as well. I’ve read a lot of Medium articles to stay abreast of what’s going on, to stay motivated, and to learn things. Perhaps this will fall into one of those categories for somebody else. I’ve also consumed vast amounts of content in my life. Maybe this is a way I can do some more creating instead. And finally, maybe there’s some value in this…
The Potential Reality…
This is an elaborate form of procrastination! It’s just taking time away from coding, learning, and building things. Effectively doing the exact opposite of what I hope to achieve. It could also be completely void of value. For myself or anyone who happens to read it. I guess we shall see.
Some Back Story
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, I operate a fork lift for a living. Why? I never focused on the career I wanted, and I need money and health insurance for my wife. It’s easy and consistent. It’s also mind numbing, soul sucking, and hardly provides the bare necessities! I’ve had enough and I’m going to change it. The past year I’ve spent teaching myself Web Development. Primarily following the freeCodeCamp curriculum. In January I received the Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship to the Mobile Web Specialist track! If I do well there’s a phase 2.
My Week
Ibegan my week wanting to implement some of the stuff I had learned in the Grow with Google curriculum. Specifically what I had learned in lesson 3 of Offline Web Applications. I wanted to cache a high score from a Frogger like game I had made using indexedDB. During a 12 hour day that my wife had to spend at the hospital I did just that. As we went to appointment after appointment I worked on it. I had 2 main struggles with adding this feature:
- Importing the idb library.
I haven’t really used many libraries. I’ve read about importing them to use them in projects, but when I actually thought about
it I wasn’t sure what that actually looked like…. I figured it out. Basically put the folder containing the necessary files
containing the code in your projects folder. Then reference the file needed from index.html with a <script> tag. That’s how I
did it anyways.
- Getting it to work on GitHub.
Since my method of importing this idb library involved using npm install idb from within my projects folder it created a
node_modules folder and put the idb folder inside of that. That was the only library that was necessary so that’s the only
folder in the node_modules folder. I was fine with that but GitHub must have found that wasteful… When I uploaded it to GitHub
it broke! As far as I could tell GitHub condensed the folders. Combined them into one. I fought with it for awhile that day but
my In-Laws were over helping my wife and I around the house and the Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics were starting. So we got
some pizza and beer and watched that! The next day I just put the idb folder with the rest of my JavaScript files and changed
the path in the <script> tag. Success! If you want you can look at my project.
If you’d rather critique my code check out this repository.
I’m a slave to my move goal! About a year ago I started hitting it every day. It directly coincides with starting to learning Web Development. I figured that taking on this path I needed to be in good health and have ample energy. Therefore, I run about 3 miles a day. I really don’t like running all that much but all in all it’s the easiest way to hit my goal. A few weeks back I started listening to podcasts about Web Development while running. I want to be more immersed in the field! This helps me do that. Last week I heard about a cool way to learn flexbox. It’s a game approach (I like vides games!) made by Dave Geddes called Flexbox Zombies. I’ve used flexbox before to center something on a page but beyond that I really had no clue. I’m giving it ago and so far I’m finding it helpful and entertaining. The biggest benefits for me are the repetition and incremental introduction to new tools. The art and cheesy story line are bonus! It’s free and not a huge time sync (maybe 20 to 40 minutes a day). In other running news I had to dodge a skunk. Never had to do that before!
I finished the Grow with Google curriculum awhile back. Since then I’ve been working on other Udacity courses and staying
involved in the community. I’m currently on the JavaScript Promises
course. It’s helping me grasp the concept quite well. I struggled setting up the practice project though. The directions give a
really nice one liner npm install to run but it seems to be for macOS or Linux. I’m on a Windows machine so I had to use more or
less the same install process but use the Node.js command prompt and Git Shell to get it done. As soon as I got it working my
laptop battery died… My wife and I were once again at the hospital so I opted to spend the rest of my time there reading comic
books instead of hunting down an outlet to keep working. An unexpected outcome of taking this course was a better understanding
of .json() vs JSON.parse(). I had been using both of these methods with the practice quizzes and wasn’t sure about when to
use which one. I took to the Grow with Google forums and reached out to my fellow students! I had a good conversation with some
knowledgeable peeps on the subject and attained a better understanding. I’m always hesitant to get involved or reach out to the
community. It’s something that I’m really working on. I generally just turn to Google for questions and find my answer rather
quickly but the value in collaboration is apparent even to me.
Next Week
I plan on finishing up the Promises course. What I’m intending to work on the most though is staying involved with the Grow with Google community. It’s by far my weakest area. They recently introduced a Study Buddy pairing system on Slack that I want to make an effort to be a part of. Something else that’s exciting is there’s talk of doing a group project. The project is a game! My interest is piqued! I hope to contribute to that.
I originally published this on Medium