Hackbright Week 5

Field trip to Twilio today. It was fun and really cool to see the inside of a big successful company.

I'm kind of at the point that I'm not really keen on HTML or CSS or JSON or any of the front end stuff. I'm trying to stay open to it, but I just don't find the same level of interest in it as I did with OOP. Perhaps it's because I'm just not as familiar with any of the aforementioned languages. But, I don't find them very fun or very logical.

I was told that AJAX and JavaScript and HTML are all basically hacks. (This was from a programmer. I think he works in Java). I'm trying to stay opened minded about them, but I just don't care for them at all. They seem ridiculously complicated and kind of stupid... maybe just not as clean.

Insight for the week or this term... Humility was it the last time. This time, it is still humility and acceptance. I was used to being at the top of my class or towards the top, but then I went to UCLA and wasn't at the top. I got used to being towards the top again at Ai and in other places. Here at Hackbright, I'm in the middle toward the bottom. Not the very bottom, but definitely not at the top. And quite frankly, I'm ok with that. I get annoyed when a friend might lump me at the bottom, but it's kind of true as I'm not quite getting everything.

When they told me at the beginning not to get competitive, I agreed with that. I just didn't expect to be so slow in picking stuff up. I'm pretty sure it's because I'm still a noob when it comes to programming, and I'll get it, but right now, it's slow going. I think that when people tell you not to become competitive, they put it in the perspective that you shouldn't look down on your fellow cohort members. I think you should also include yourself in that group. Don't look down on yourself if you are not getting it as fast as others. Don't think that you're a dumbass because you're not getting the script to work. It's experience and learning more syntax. Making the connections between words/braces/curly braces/brackets and such.

I'm looking forward to next week. I think that a lot of the issues of understanding that I have right now will get cleared up when I'm working on my own project. I'll have a personal stake in it. As many of my programmer friends have told me, "Having a project is the best way to learn how to program." Right now, I have enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not efficiently dangerous. Hopefully, I'll become efficiently dangerous during project time.

Hackbright Week 4 day 2... no, I can't remember the actual day number

So, I'm going by week and day instead. Don't judge me!

Today was one of those days at Hackbright. Yesterday, I felt on top of the world. Today, I want to bang my head against the table...

JQuery, AJAX... they can both just bite me... well, maybe more AJAX than JQuery... Actually, I like JQuery... I need to know more! I need to learn more! GAAAAAH!

My partner and I got stuck on this one problem for three hours. THREE hours... the problem? AJAX's asynchronous sending and retrieving of data and one set of parentheses... If we didn't put the damn parentheses in the stupid line, we would have been just fine, but nooooooo, we put them there and it wouldn't freaking work.

BLEAAAAAAAAH!

It was definitely one of these moments when Katie, our lovely T.A. came over and explained that to us:

I love this gif, but I'm not fond of the way I look. Not happy with the line. I think I'll redraw it.

Tomorrow is a study hall. No, I'm not going to redraw my gif tomorrow (oh jeez, I see how my laptop got cut off there... grrrr) during study hall. It might happen tomorrow night. Using Flash. And maybe using Queelie, a character I came up with while at art school... Hmmm... also looks like my body got bigger too... gah, I'm so critical of myself!

Oh, what I will work on tomorrow is two things: getting my data into a database and messing around with it with sqlite3 and getting my Flask application for GlazeHub going... yes, I'm going to use the UberMelon CSS. Especially the nav bar.

Just going to end with another:

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!

Hackbright... the start of week 4

I can't believe that I'm done with 3 weeks. This is crazy! I've seemed to have learned a lot, but can't remember crap from the previous week. Also, remembering which type of syntax goes where... good lord.

Today, we worked in Python, HTML, Flask and Jinja2... yes... 4 different syntaxes right there all working together or not. Oh and don't forget to throw in a bit of SQLite3 too...

At least today I had a partner who wasn't too far ahead of me. She is much more confident typing out the code where I still freeze. However, I was able to figure out some of the key points of logic as to why our code wasn't working or what was causing issues. AND for once, I was able to get through the entire exercise early! We were finished by 5:11, got a code review from the awesome Joel who said that our code was basically good, but he gave us some style suggestions. We fixed our code up as per his suggestions and that took us til 6pm almost exactly. It was a great feeling to finish!

This whole experience has really been great for me. In the past few years, I've noticed how hard I find it to ask for help or to be wrong. Hackbright has taught me humility. It's OK to not be right all the time and to be able to ask for help. I may not be a great or even good programmer by the end of all this, but I'll be decent and I'll be able to figure out how to find the answers to my questions or puzzles.

On Wednesday, we shall have a study day. I'm going to keep going through my JavaScript book and try to get this into my head.

I am determined to get JS and HTML to work together!!!

Hackbright Academy - End of Week 3

There are simply too many things to learn. But that is ok. Guess that will make me a lifelong learner? Whatever that means.

So we covered SQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript this week. The good news is that I can now read the inspect element and source code of a page and puzzle it out. The bad news is that there is so much more to know about Javascript than is possible to learn in one day of lecture and one study day.

I started reading my 3d game programming book that teaches JavaScript, but it won't teach me how to get Javascript and HTML talking properly. So, I ended up going to Barnes and Noble and plunking down nearly $100 for two books. The crap part is that if I bought the book they had in stock at Amazon instead, I would have saved about $14. But, I would have had to wait. So, it's all good and I'll be reading up on JavaScript for the next few nights.

As a language, I don't find it all that daunting. It's just learning all the tricks to get it to modify the DOM (Document Object Model) that will occupy most of my attention.

Today was a study hall day. I figured out two of the three parts of our last lesson. Got help on the third from Wendy. In turn, I helped her with one that she was working on. No, I didn't tell her the exact answer, just pointed out what I learned after a rather extensive Google crawl on "JavaScript getElementsByName" and some other random words that appeared in the exercise. The key point was that getElementsByName returns an array and it helps to get a specific item from said array in order to change an image. Not sure why yet... maybe the book will help.

Instead of reading up on anything or doing some of the exercises again, I decided to start building up some of my glaze calculator app. I started yesterday with just hard coding a recipe and feeding the numbers into a function to get the kilos. Today, I added some data requests from the user, created a dictionary to hold the name of the ingredient and its volume percentage and got that data manipulated by the kilo function (dividing the percentage by 100 and then multiplying by 1000). I hope to update the code to test if the weight is given as a percentage or by a decimal... you know... you can't trust users. I also have to start adding classes to some of the functions. Time to go review that game we worked on. Also have to try making up the logo. Can't decide between some cute wriggly insect or a mechanical/tech-y looking G with dangly dongly bits...

Tonight, I fully intended to do some clay work for that art show in December. Instead, I came upstairs, ate bad food, finished a loom knitting project (sweater for my parents' kitten!), made one of my cats model said sweater and watched Quickdraw on Hulu.

I'm determined to go to sleep shortly and get up early. Tomorrow, I definitely have to work on my latest clay project. I also have to meet with my third mentor, go to Clay Planet to take photos of some glaze samples (and post) and also make some tags for Julie at Steepers... Yes, I can do it all!

I am determined. I shall post tomorrow to see if I actually get it all done.

Hackbright... Javascript... pain and pleasure!

A pirate walks into a bar. He sits down, orders his drink and settles in. The bartender looks over the pirate and is quite impressed because the pirate has everything: the tricorn hat, the peg leg, even the parrot. But something is off. Finally, the bartender asks, "Sir, I'm really digging what you're wearing. But, I gotta ask. What is with the steering wheel in your pants?

The pirate responds, "Aaaaargh, it's driving me nuts!"

Thank you, Erika for that joke. I paraphrased.

Ok, for most of the day, I was kind of on fire. I understood what we were doing. Javascript seemed easy... And I was exceptionally pleased to see the return of curly braces surround parts of a function, if statement, for loop, while loop AND semi-colons! Yes, it's these bits of punctuation and whatever designation curly braces are that make me happy.

I even told my advisor, Katie, that I was having a great time. I was confident and just really pleased.

And then, I tried to do exercise 5. I cannot get the html file and the javascript file to work together well. I'm missing something major. And I honestly do not know what it is I'm missing. I am so very frustrated and annoyed. I even took to twitter to complain... And facebook.

I'm trying to figure it out now and I just can't seem to get it to work. I keep getting null objects. WHY?????

Here's a purple dragon for you... yes, it's just the same as the other dragons, but he's purple and he's my new Github avatar.

oh, at least I can now read the HTML code that drives what content I show in this blog... Small victories.

Hackbright... Week 3, not sure which day... I lose track

Last night, I got to meet two of my three mentors. Emily and Niranjani are great! Emily is a Hackbright alum and she knows what I'm going through right now. Niranjani is an engineer with an MS. My goodness, I feel so... uneducated? Not sure if that is quite the right word. Both are very nice and very supportive. I hope to gain a lot of wisdom from them both.

The past few days, we've been covering CSS and HTML. Both are much easier to 'learn' compared to Python and SQL. They just have their quirks in how to make them do what you want them to do. However, I am finding both far less confusing and far less frustrating than oh... dictionaries in Python. Which I really need to review again.

Javascript is up next. It seems relatively interesting/easy/probably my cluelessness is making me think it's easy... However, it's not doing something that I think it should do and I have no idea why it isn't working... I think I should go to sleep and figure it out tomorrow... in fact, that is what I shall do.

In talking with my fellow Hackbrighters and with Emily, I'm finding an interesting commonality. It seems that before Hackbright, a number of us could operate on 4-5 hours of sleep and still make it through our work days. However, at Hackbright that is not the case at all. We need a lot more sleep. I think a lot of us were bored and really needed to find something to get our minds stimulated. I do worry that I'm going to need more and more stimulation, but hopefully, it's not as drug addict seeming as it kind of feels. Interesting... to need more and more mental stimulation.

One thing I'm worried about is that I'm not feeling the same stress as some of my fellows because I know the application that I want to make. Although my application may not be the most appealing to companies, but I do have a market for it. Not sure I'll be able to make money from it... maybe from ads haha...

I am stressed though. My chin has a ton of zits on it as proof of my stress. And it's after midnight... yeah.. still not doing well on the sleeping thing...

Hackbright Day11 - the glory of databases and SQL (lite)

First of all, Joel Burton is an awesome teacher. I really look forward to his lectures. They are informative and instructional. He can make daunting topics much more approachable.

Today, we started to learn about databases and SQL. I'm actually enjoying writing up queries to the database. First OOP and now database queries... it's kind of amazing that I am finding such things interesting and fun. Crazy.

I'm still having issues with dictionaries. I feel like my level of comfort is a week off. By that, I mean that the week I feel comfortable with them a week after they are presented. Probably because I'm working with them or have worked with them more. Still going through Skill2. I have most of it right. I'm now trying to do the extra credit.

Oh, and I've signed up to do a talk about Image Formats and Compression. My advisor, Katie, thought it best that I talk to Christian about image formats as a lightning talk. So, I approached him and he unloaded a ton of information on me. What do I remember? Well, something about Fourier Transforms and how they are used to compress JPG images. Honestly, I need to know more about the technical aspects of image compression. I know what looks good/bad. Now, I can explain why.

Ok, it's 12:30 a.m. I really need to go to bed/sleep earlier.

One more thing, I had my first coding dream this morning... it was a crossover with Doctor Who too. Guess we know what is on my mind!

And I had to spray the clay for the Bene Gesserit sculpture. I just don't have the time to work on it during the week!

Friday. I shall come home, feed the cats and work on that sculpture Friday night and Saturday. I must get it done! Also, I need to glaze my latest Cthulhu mugs. I can do it all! Really, I can!

Must remember:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

HB Week 3

Q:  What did the 0 say to the 8?

A:  Nice belt!

So, tomorrow starts week 3 of Hackbright Academy. We're going to leave Python behind and go over databases, java script and more. I'm looking forward to that. But, in the mean time, I'm going to freak out that I am having a hell of a time figuring out how to deal with the skills 2 exercises. I mean, it took forever for me to figure out the first one!

I don't know if I need more time to just write the code and get the muscle memory for dictionaries or I just don't get how to do it. Sometimes, I feel like I'm randomly adding square brackets or parentheses and praying one will work.

Oh, and in going over the skills exercises from week 1, I feel ok but I keep forgetting the basic things like... oh, calling the function so the script actually works.

Sigh...

Ok, here's a list of things I get:

for loops
the concept of Object Oriented Programming
the idea of classes
modularity

I'm not going to write a list of what I don't get as that would take way too much space. Plus, I'm not sure I even remember what I don't get.

On a positive note though, I got to see some code that a friend's husband is writing to help out his brother. The code was written in Python and I actually understood what was written there. Maybe not all the super long lines of code, but for the most part, I understood the structure. I also got to see some javascript. It looks similar but not. A lot of declaration of variables. I like that. That seems familiar.

Ok, I'm going to work on the exercises till 11pm and then go to sleep.

I am not going to panic. I am not going to freak out. I can do this!

HB Day 9 - Slightly more confident, but maybe that's because of the assignment

Q:  How can you tell if a computer scientist is an extrovert?
 A: He's the one looking at your shoes instead of his (or her!) own

Chuckle chuckle, right? No? OK haha

So, it's Thursday night and after 9. I got home around 8:45 or so? Not sure. But, I did stop by the pottery studio tonight to pick up some bowls. One was good. The other... well, it's going to Clay Planet for fixing up. Still, I didn't really want to go to the studio tonight. I just wanted to come home and get to fixing up some code.

Can we say that my obsessive nature has finally kicked in? Yes. Yes, we can. I was up til midnight last night trying to get some code to work (Markov Chains!). Tonight, I should try to get to bed earlier.

Well, why am I slightly more confident when a few days ago I was wondering if I'd ever get it? I think it's because I'm finding a bit more success with our assignments. We're currently working on a game which is a lot of fun and there is a great deal of room for creativity. I even got to make some sprites.

Yes, that is poo on the side there. I could have made the shadows a bit lighter, but naaaah... that's not the point here.

At any rate, my partner and I have been having some success in getting our game to work. You can either scare off a dragon or get killed by it... thus, the ashes, poop and frozen girl.

Oh, we've been covering classes and object oriented programming these past few days. I like these. I understand them. Now, I need to go through our code for our dragons and try to make them a bit more efficient or polymorphic.

Except, I want to get my twitter Markov chain bot working first... well, the Markov bit. Twitter can happen tomorrow.

HB Day 7 - Settling in

So, Day 5 was a study day. It was good and a bit more relaxing that the previous four. We celebrated surviving the first week with champagne. Yum yum.

Monday/Day 6 wasn't too bad, but I was uncaffeinated and so very sleepy. It didn't help that the lecture room was darkened and it was warm too. Still, we learned about dictionaries which will be very helpful for my final project. I hope I get approved for that project, the name for which has been decided: Glazehub. Yes, it is like Github, but it's for glazes!

Right now, I'm thinking that Glazehub will have three sections: the Glaze Calculator, the Glaze Price Quote/Order form and the Glaze Search. See, it's a hub for all the pieces. I even have a prototype logo that I will have to create later.

Onto Day 7. Today. Well, I was caffeinated, so I was awake and alert, much more than I've been. I'm finally sleeping well too. Thank goodness. Anyhow, we covered exercise 6 (my partner and I did complete exercise 6 yesterday and exercise 7). During practice, my partner and I finished up exercise 5 which took a lot more time than we expected. If anything, exercise 5 taught us how useful dictionaries are. It's so crazy to know about dictionaries and to be prohibited from using them to solve a problem!

Ok, so what are my concerns. Well, I'm concerned that I'm not retaining enough. I cannot seem to quickly answer questions that a large number of other fellows can. I still freeze when asked what does that piece of code you've written do. Or when I write some code. I think I'm so scared of being wrong that my brain freezes and I just blank. I really need to get over that.

The other thing that I need to get over is my tendency to jump in and just spout off what I think needs to be done regardless of order or whether or not it's really necessary. I need to slow down and really think about things logically and figure out what needs to be done first. I think that this was always one of my problems. I jump around and skip steps, return to them later and such. I know I will get there eventually, but I probably waste a lot of time in between.

Another concern is pair programming. I'm not always keeping up with my partner, so I'm behind and not always understanding what is going on in the code. I'm also kind of clueless when it comes to all the methods that can be used and how to use them. Well, not completely clueless, but my knowledge base feels pretty small. There is so much to learn there and to know. I feel like I've got a limited vocabulary and I'm trying to speak in full sentences with very little luck. Fortunately, I can usually get my point across and figure out why something isn't working if the problem is logic based. Still, it can be very frustrating when I can't get my point across or my partner interrupts my train of thought or makes me get into the nitty gritty right from the start instead of starting with the general and going to the nitty gritty.

I think I need more time to work some of these programs/exercises on my own in order to actually learn what it is I need to know. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in the day and last weekend, my brain was totally fried and I couldn't study anything or try anything til late Sunday night. Maybe it's not more time. I just need to do this for myself. Start to live, breathe and eat coding. I can do that for a little while, but then I know the clay will call me. Or some other art form.

There's a part of me that is telling me, "See! This is why you never did programming back in the day! You don't have the mental capacity to do it!" I'm doing my best to ignore that voice. I'm getting some of what we're learning, just not enough.

But, I'm continuing and it's not that I feel like a failure, I just don't feel confident and successful. I'm hoping in time that that will change. And despite all my worries or that little voice, I'm not discouraged. I am going to keep on going to class and keep on trying to figure it out. I'm sure I'll get there. Just not as fast as others or as I hope. We'll see. I'll keep on writing in this blog and maybe I'll be able to look back one day and see if there's a switch where I have no or little confidence to where I have a ton. Might be interesting to see...

HB Day 4 - getting better

Today, I gave myself permission to not do the homework exactly. I looked it over. I figured out what needs to be done. And that was it. I decided I will leave it to fully do tomorrow and that is just fine. My brain can only handle so much.

Traffic was fine except for the jaywalker in spiked heels who started crossing the road as I was approaching (yes, I had the light) and then she stopped and turned around because she had dropped her scarf and a nice man called her attention to it. She jumped when I honked at her. Good thing I was going slowly, but still... JAYWALKING!... ok, does that count as an interesting story about traffic?

Today, we covered lists in lecture and memory. I've decided that I like lists. I want to learn all I can about them and become and expert on that. I think I'll also see if I can give a lightning talk about memory... the whole iPod playlist story. Good times.

I have to say that although I'm not sleeping well and although I'm frustrated, it's fine. I'm really enjoying the challenge. For the first time in a very, very long time, I'm mentally challenged. Things are not coming easily and that is fine. If it were coming easily, then I would be wondering why I was paying them to teach me this. (Oh yeah, I'm terrible at self study). But it's good and draining and exactly the experience I've been craving. (We'll see how I feel next week.) At any rate, this is good for me despite the traffic and frustrations.

------------

Tonight, I talked with Matt and Isabelle (Nick and Ken) about potential names for my app. Well, the one name that we really liked, Glazebot, has already been taken. Dammit! Glazemonkey was another idea. It's good, but not as much fun as Glazebot...

Glazebunny

Glazebug

Glazenado

Glazetron6000

humbug...

Oh, I think I'll see if I can add another feature to my glaze app. Trolling the internet to find glaze recipes of a specific kind. Cone 5-6, cone 10... copper red...

Glazetroll...

ugh

HB Day 3 - not a bad day

So, I'm not sleeping well. For some reason, I wake up around 3 a.m. and not being able to go back to sleep easily. My hope is that tonight will be much better. This morning, I woke up rather energized because I had to call up Kaiser to check out how I can get coverage. Yes, I should have gotten that done before today or yesterday rather as my coverage ran out yesterday and I didn't get that flu shot I wanted. I think I shall go to Walgreens. Maybe this will teach me to not procrastinate.

Commute. Well, going was not bad as I left around 7:30. I think I shall keep doing that. I made it to Hackbright around 9:20 or so. I was able to call Kaiser's sales people and get some information. I decided on which level of coverage to get. I still needed to figure out if I was going to get some help from Covered California. By the time I got home, I decided to get the Covered California help and apply for Kaiser through the website. Now, I have to wait to see if I get coverage and if I do, then I have to wait til November 1 to actually be covered.

Commute coming home was terrible. Took me a little over two hours. I was soooo tired too! Still, I promise to stop complaining about the commute, unless it takes more than two hours to get there or if there is a particuarly funny or interesting story to tell.

As for the class today, well, I seem to be falling into a pattern. The morning exercise goes really well to the point that I think, "Hey! I got this!" The afternoon exercise just gets frustrating. At least today, I figured out what we had to do, just not how exactly to do it. We got help and were able to get most of it done.

Oh, what was covered? More functions and git and GitHub.  Good times. I need to set up my computer to get GitHub all set up on my computer and to check stuff in. However, I'm so tired right now, I can't think straight.

Hopefully, I can sleep better tonight.