jQuery

Apologies to the bees

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When I was a kid, I liked to collect bees in a jar. It was a little bit of derring do to see how many I could keep in the jar and also not lose any as I opened the jar for another one. It was also a chance to look at the bees close up. But I was a kid. Selfish by default at that stage in child development. I wanted to hear them. Really hear them. I shook the jar, and I heard them. Did I ever. I’m sure their buzzing could be translated into “Open this jar, jackhole, and we’ll give you a symphony you’ll never forget!”

It’s been a long time, but I think the descendents of that hive are buzzing with karmic delight. September stuffed me in a jar and shook me until my head spun. Some of the shaking was great: close friends from Australia came to visit the US and stayed with me at the beginning and end of their trip. Some not so great: my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer and leukemia. If I wasn’t giving friends a tour of Austin, I was in a group text with family, and when I had my down time, I zoned out wondering if I’d get that call.

I found a small project to do. I could have done it in less time, but I had too little space in my head for coding. Still, I had something to do, and I learned that I enjoyed doing it. Although hard to get going, once I did, Stella got her groove back. It felt great to get lost in coding. Even looking up things I was certain I knew how to do helped. Just a rabbit warren of Slack Overlord and MDN links was soothing. Fussing over where to place a button, was the distraction I needed. I need to remember that even 10 minutes of code fussin’ counts for 100 Days of Code in my book. My book; my rules.

So the bees had their revenge, but they’re nicer and eventually let me have a win. It’s just a basic quotation generator. And it’s QUOTATION! Quote is a verb. Let it go, Katy. I CAN’T.

Language Buffet

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Adjustments. Oof. I feel like I’ve finished my Thanksgiving meal and am hitching the waist of my jeans over my full belly. So much oof.

I have a short-term job for a month. Not only will I be working 8:30-5:00, I’ll have a 45-minute commute (bicycle) to and from. You do the math. I’m left with too little time for my original 100 Days of Code plan: an app a day.

What to do?

I am having trouble letting go of the app-a-day version, but I have also lamented the lack of time I’m giving to learning new languages. It’s a swap. A fair one at that, too. I’ve returned to Codecademy and have a goal of completing PHP and Python while repeating JavaScript and jQuery to make sure the new knowledge doesn’t shove out the old. I majored in German. I remembered taking Italian after I finished German. English didn’t creep into the Italian, but the German did. I believe that had I returned to German as I started Italian, I’d not have been as mixed up. Nothing’s proven. I do not have enough Katys to publish a peer-reviewed article on how I learn.

Wish me luck.

 

100 Days of Code: Lover Leaver

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On an AJAX kick. Today I played with the Words API. I’m not done with that API at all! That is a playground I’ve just barely sampled. Today I just wanted to play with getting rhymes. I couldn’t think of a useful app to make with rhymes, but I’m nothing if not a killer smartass, so I reached into my smartarasscockles and came up with a way for you to find 50 ways to leave your lover.

Lover Leaver

I use Simon and Garfunkle’s lyryics (Okay, Paul Simon’s) chorus to make an array of leads (var leads = [“Make a new ”, “Drop of the ” …]) and chose a random rhyme from the array returned from the AJAX request. Of course this and that some rhymes are iffy lead to lunacy. I can’t (or don’t know how) to just get nouns and other filters to make this make sense, but if you want a logical way to leave your lover, maybe you should make your own damn decision and not use my app, right?

I’d have liked to do more, but I’ve run out of time. I have my limits.

I can’t believe AJAX was hard for me. As I play around with third-party APIs, I can’t recognize where I got stymied. Moly holy. Stress can be blinding.

Ha! AJAX is my buddy.

100 Days of Code: Numbers API

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When I was in the midst of my coding bootcamp, my kitchen and utility rooms flooded because … I don’t know. Something blocked it, obviously, but I chose not to drill into my house. I run the washing machine water outside. That’s solved the problem. I also have very green grass. But at the time, was I this blasé about it? Aw hayull no. I fell apart. I saw the damage and wondered if I could afford it. From that day on, everything was about finding a job to pay for repairs. I could not think straight. What would I have to sell? Do I really need to wash my clothes?

That stress became a huge obstacle, and it came just as we learned about AJAX requests. I don’t know if it was clumsy typing or what, I was just not able to do them well. Sometimes not at all. Not without help. 

Now that AJAX is not part of homework, but just part of coding for fun to keep up the skills, I do not see the difficulty. Not at all. I am looking for third-party APIs to play with, and I’m not finding that getting or manipulating the data is something I cannot do. What a lesson in the damage stress causes us. 

I don’t know how I’ll use this later, but I had fun with it. The only awkward moment was getting excited to see my first trivia snippet on the date and then to read that it was something about the Nazis. 

Numbers API trivia

(I will also add 4 more chapters to “Learn Python the Hard Way” to my 100DoC. I WANT CREDIT, DAMMIT!)

100 Days of Code: 26. Ugh. Finally

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Did you ever have crushes on people just because there was no one else around to crush on? I called those boredom crushes. And I felt as committed to this exercise as I do a boredom crush. 

I came up with it while in a meh mood. It’s a small app. Not much code. Because I couldn’t find the love, I could not finish it. Longest short project ever. I finished. I’m proud of that. I could have just ghosted the poor thing. 

I’m done. But now I feel like I’ve gone too far with my boredom crush and things will just be awkward.

Save the rat!

100 Days of Code: Battle snake

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Took a little break. Le meaujeau was on vacation. Really I was just stuck. I looked at a code that was the first in a “learn to code” book and made it mine. In doing so, I made it more complicated. I’m okay with that. I didn’t want to play with prompt and alert. I just wanted an idea. 

The original project—the one in the book—is to make a simple Battleship game of just one row of seven possible positions. I’m not into Battleship. I’ve no desire to kill all of those people. Instead, I made a pet snake (Waylon) that ate my pet rat (Willie). I also limited the number of cuts and gave the snake more sections to cut. 

It’s not done, so there’s no link. I’m almost done. I’m mostly done, which is far better from being mostly dead. Tomorrow will be my last day to work on it. If there are bugs or ways to fool the app, then I’ll deal with that after I’ve done 100. 

Here’s what it looks like so far. You can see uncut, cut, and rat furr. You can also see why I am not in art school:

100 Days of Code: Getting the Scoop

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I’ve been dragging my heels on doing an about-me page. I just find blathering on about myself to be an exercise in wankery. 

Still in a doodle mood, I came up with this after staring at my backyard and wondering if I should clear the landmines. I used to teach 4th grade. I myself am arrested at 10, so I understood their humor. This little app shows that. 

I got beaten up by my getRandom function, but I solved that by just making the entire app simpler. Since I come alive around 4p, I have less time than I’d like to have. I am up late anyway, but I have my limits. 

Get the scoop

100 Days of Code: Don’t be skeert

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It was a dark and stormy night. 

Not really. It was a bright, sunny, muggy day, but my laptop was in a dark place. I’m sure it’s just a phase.

I had serious plans to get my jQuery on, but I was still in the mood to doodle. Conveniently, I came up with jQuery ideas while I was doodling. I don’t know if it was the act of doodling or just that by the time I started, my brain woke up. I’m not a morning person. I get up at 5a, but I do not function until after 12. I am starting to think that it’s futile for me to come up with something before noon.

A dark and stormy night. And I never got around to making it stormy. Just let it be a dark night, okay? 

[edited: Added jQueryUI for shakes. Whoo hoo!]

100 Days of Code

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Had way too much fun doing this one. 

My goals were simple: 

  • learn a function that determines if a number is prime
  • “glue” a div onto a photo to make it look like a sign 
  • play with css and jQuery to change the display

    • I took a DoC break and found that doing that just makes me sad. If I can’t come up with an idea, I should still just play and see what comes to my mind. That is what happened. I was lethargic all day until I decided to look up how to determine if a number was prime. While writing down that function, I came up with more ideas.

    I miss my instructors, so when I can, I like to use them. Always good to see their faces. 

    The Prime Feline

    100 Days of Code: Scavenger hunt

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    I had fun with this one because I got my doodle on and made my own things for a fish to find. The fish is the rare Torinfish. So rare, that there’s only one. Torin is the daughter of a friend, and I made this app for her. She loves to swim, so I am having her fish clean the pool. There are 10 objects to find. 

    I did not finish or get as far as I wanted to, but I left it functioning. I am happy as it is and look forward to making these changes on another day:

    • Having a list of items that either disappear as I find each or an empty list that builds.
    • Make two random number generators that come up with the top and left position for the hidden objects so that no two rounds will be the same. 
    • Have a button that starts a swimmer, and the user has to find all of the objects before the swimmer finishes. 
    • Make more doodles!!

    Scavenger hunt: clean the pool

    Good fun, but it’s bed time now. Nuh nye.