learning to code

750 Words: Practice, Habits, Learning

~ ihatetoast ~ Leave a comment

(750words.com entry for today: 911 words, including metadata list,  stats)

To learn something (anything), one has to practice. The comic artist Sarah Andersen of Sarah’s Scribbles has a widely shared strip about what makes her great. It’s practice. No matter what anyone tells you, it’s practice. Practice is closely related to habit.

If I want to improve upon a skill, I need to practice often and then that becomes a habit. A good one. With ADHD, it is hard to get a habit going. Unlike what some people assume, the distraction for me is not TV—it is other skills. Let’s reference another wonderful comic artist: Allie Brosh, the genius behind Hyperbole and a Half and the much-memed “All the things!” drawing. I’m not distracted by bad things. I’m distracted by other skills and topics within skills. I’m distracted by the newsletters that inform me of new tutorials and tutorials that teach me new frameworks. If I’m trying to break into web development, I’m working on HTML5, CSS3, preprocessors, JavaScript, JS frameworks and libraries, Node, etc. I’ll be focusing on one when an idea for another pops up. That is, while making an HTML/CSS technical document page for a FreeCodeCamp project, an idea for a fullstack app comes to mind. It takes incredible will not to change focus. This little blog post was started when I was thinking about what topic to write about for that technical document assignment.

I should add that this is a problem when flying solo. It’s another reason I love having a boss. I may have ADHD, but I also have anxiety about not doing my job and doing right by my team and manager. Not a sycophant in anyway, but I don’t slack if it means another person will look bad. Right now, I’m flying solo. I am my worst boss. Now, to give myself a break, as I look up job postings and read about what I have to know to be considered, I can’t help but add to my “Learn all the things” list. And to learn all the things, I have to practice. Practice and practice. Lather and repeat. Forget rinsing. I don’t think that works when I want to retain skills. No rinsing. Just keep lathering.

Here are the skills and habits I need to build. There’s no order. I’m writing this as they come to me. There’s never any order!
Skill: HTML5 + CSS3 mobile-first responsive web design.
Skill: JavaScript frontend fun—focusing on ReactJS, not forgetting little jQuery, and getting to know VueJS.
Skill: JavaScript backend with Node—getting endpoints and routing down pat, getting comfy with noSQL as well as SQL, ExpressJS myself.
Habit: Planning app in advance vs creating on the fly.
Habit: Addressing build/Gulp and testing/Mocha-Chai in every project.
Skill: Python—make more of a priority
Skill: Game Maker Language—for fun and for OOP practice.
Habit: GitHub—not working on the master, branches for every new thing.
Habit: Jobs—apply daily!
Habit: Own up—Tweet daily the #100daysofcode and blog the process (do not blog daily)
Skill: German—Refresh it. Listen to a YouTube video every day.
Skill: Art—Doodle on Sketch App to illustrate my own apps or just do my own doodles. Wacom, paper?
Habit: Read—Read before bed. Read fiction! Escape.
Habit: Craft—Attack the fiber stash.
Habit: Exercise—C25k, gym, and/or cycle. August is awful.
Habit: Healthy eating—This would be better labeled “Don’t let ADHD’s impulsivity affect your food choices”, but that is too long.
Skill: Writing—I don’t care if it’s handwriting and dealing with my illegible script or getting a postcard out. Just write.

If I kept track of the above with a bar graph, there’d be tall bars on the tech skills and smaller bars on skills and habits that have some distance from the laptop. I blame the job situation. Hard to put down the laptop and tech learning to read or attack the yarn stash when I am underemployed. I am ok with that. I can’t have this even. Once employed, I know the other things will get more attention. Right? Yes. Right … RIGHT!

What about the ethics? This gets me a lot. To learn, I watch tutorials, but if I just do their projects, it’s just follow the leader. I have to do my own. Tutorials, therefore, take a lot of time for me. I watch, rewind, then do. I do this until my own idea that applies this skill comes to my head. I create my own repo for a new app. For example, I’m doing Brad Traversy’s fullstack social media tutorial. I watch and listen, I do what he does. On my own, I’m applying what I’m learning to make a social media app for adoption groups so that they don’t have to always rely on Facebook for their volunteers to connect. I’m writing down other ideas for social media apps with the hope of every new social media app I do, I’ll refer less and less to the tutorial. Is it ok to do this? Am I plagiarising? Or is this like taking various illustrations to trace and trace and trace, then build your own style doing your own thing? I do not know. I just know that I have to practice. I need to copy someone. I’m by myself. I am not in a classroom or workspace where I can flesh things out with instructors and senior devs.

I’m winging it.

I’m still learning how I learn, Vern.

COFFEE: 2
ENERGY: 6
FOCUS: 4
HAPPINESS: 7
LOCATION: home
STRESS: 6
AMPM: am
NONFICTION: t

 

Ok to be the good-enough dev? Yepsilon.

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Oh, I just know that would raise some hackles. “Good enough” sounds like one is lowering the bar. If I want to be just good enough dev, then I’m ok with bugs, sloppy code, side-effects, untested code. But what is the next level up from good-enough? Better enough? Hardly. Not if you care about spoken and written language. Best? Who is best? Perfect? Riiiight. You keep telling yourself that, tiger. Perfectionism is not our friend, nor are those who think they are perfect. So let us be happy calling what is not perfect “good enough”. Ok? Are you with me?

If you’re too code-y dev-y, then think about epsilon and any approximation algorithms. I have been watching MIT’s Open CourseWare (if only I could stop calling it Online CourseWare or writing MITOCD), specifically 6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python with Dr. Ana Bell. While going over the approximate solution for finding a cube root, I re-encountered epsilon (ε, or error. To find a cube root of a number that isn’t a perfect cube, I have to be ok with getting close enough. Good enough, not perfect. See? Ok. Good enough seems less lazy now, doesn’t it? Sure. You were ready to label me lazy until I mentioned “algorithms” and “epsilon”. The larger my epsilon, the less accurate my answer will be, but it is still epsilon.

I’m never going to be perfect. I will never finish a project if I worry so much about perfection. But I can be good enough with an epsilon of 0.1. And the next iteration of that project, theme, or tutorial assignment could be good enough with ε = 0.01. More learning and practice and repetition and repetition and repetition will lead to ε = 0.0001. But I will never be perfect. And that’s ok.

What I want to say here this morning is that “the devil” is the spirit of fear that drives us into rigidity and anxiety, which saps our good will and clouds our compassion. The spirit of Love is where our allegiance lies as good people, spiritual people, people who want to make the world better place. Love is always in dialogue with fear in our souls and bodies and minds. So when perfectionism is sharpening its claws in you, take some deep breaths, stop comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, remind yourself to be a good enough witch, and wonder — what would this whole situation be like if I had more love.

(from The Devil and Martha Stewart, by Meg “OMG I lurv her!” Barnhouse)

Train tanty & commuter coding

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First, the tanty:

I’m earning a little coin doing some part-time work far away. Not quite in a galaxy, but damn near close to being one. To get there, I could drive. I have. It works. If I leave at 6am, I get there at 6:30 and workout, shower, and relax before I start working. The traffic is minimal and while it’s three times the distance from my house to Austin’s CBD, it takes less time to commute to this almost-galaxy at 6a than to the CBD at 8. But no matter how early I get up and how fast the commute is, it’s still driving. I’m also coming home in school traffic. I get nothing done. Who does? Who on earth gets anything done while driving? Oh yeah, the phone users. Let’s not start a rant about them.

I’ve sussed it out. I used to live in a city with a decent rail system (yo, Brisbane!), and have had to get used to Austin thinking it’s a city but having only one train. ONE! Two cars and running hourly on one route. I wouldn’t call this a rail system. I’d call it a functional amusement park. Austin, darling, you’re hardly weird by not embracing rail. Your hippies, hipsters, and pseudo “weirdos” are in cars (often solo) and clogging up your roads. It’s not Californians’ fault. We are backwards thanks to decisions made by people born and raised here. But go on blaming California. It’s more a sign that you’re bad at math.

Now the coding:

Now, to get to work, I cycle 30 minutes, take the train for another 30, then cycle 15 more. Coming home it’s slower due to the time of day and a serious uphill commute. I have 30 minutes in there to open up the laptop and tap tap tap. I could work on existing code and projects, but since my desk is my lap, and I have no space to write AND I have no give on the time I can unpack and pack, I thought the best thing for me to do is either read about coding, data science, and how-tos, blog about them, or do easy mini projects to keep my mind occupied on the train.

I initialised a repo on GitHub just for this. I have no general plan other than to commit whatever I’ve done. I may start and delete. I may copy something from one project over and take it back. I may just have little bitty things or one larger thing built in itty bitty steps. I think of this repo and 30 minutes (x2) as my version of train sudoku or crossword puzzles. It’s less about the final code than it is just to code. Anything.

I think my only rule will be to work on JavaScript (nilla or jQuery) bits that I can add Sketch App work to in order to balance the logic with the creativity.

And now I have spent this first chunk on a blog post that starts with a tanty ranty. Ah. Venting Tssssss. All good. My boat; my rules.

Must remember to get bored

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Pressure is on always.

I need to apply for jobs. I look at job postings. Employers want lots of skills.

I need to get more skills. I take online tutorials and follow blog how-tos. I do what they say.

I need to commit to GitHub every day. I need to commit something amazing that I have done on my own without a support group that looks like the next big thing.*

I have to make time to learn and do my own stuff. Do I focus on little skills (do this one thing) or bigger ones (libraries and frameworks)?

I decide to make something biggish. I want it to be mobile first and need to sketch it out. I need pen and paper. But I need to code. If I don’t code and prove it on GitHub, I can’t possibly be improving anything. So I wing it. I don’t like what I make. Looks unplanned. It is unplanned. It’s ugly, but the jQuery works or the component shows up. Whoo hoo!

I do this; I do that. I’m busy busy busy. Mornings with CSS. Afternoons with front and backend. Read best practices for UI. Read “The Art of Readable Code”. Ignore that lovely escapist novel you wanted to read. Again.

But where is the much-needed void? Where is the time I spend on the couch staring at the ceiling thinking of nothing until an idea enters? Where is my GitHub repo for that? No. I didn’t code today. I let my mind wander, and I got this great idea …

This is my problem. No one makes me do what I am doing. I am doing a great job working on getting (and remembering) new things, but I am not doing a good job of doing nothing and letting my mind go. I can’t combine this with running. I can’t stop and write ideas down by scraping notes in the sweat and sunscreen on my arms.

It’s time to let myself get bored. Do very minor code changes (make ES5 functions fat arrow functions, alter style, did I really want that colour?) and then do nothing impressive. Get bored. Wonder “what if …”. Think back to my classroom and what I wish I had an app for. Come up with a story for a VueJS book. Be unbusy and let ideas enter my brain.

Then write that shit down, woman!

Get over yourself. You love to code. You’re new, you need to learn more. But you love it. And you know you’ll love it even more when you’re building what you’ve thought of, so let that happen. Not typing div or this.sumpin=this.sumpin.bind(this) or transform: rotate(-45deg) every day does not mean I’m not a developer. Planning. Drawing. Designing. They count.

The pressure is on from people I don’t know, so why am I adding to it? I am my project manager (micro managing and stubborn), UI designer (clearly drinks too much), front-end developer (tenacious but a bit high strung at the mo), and backend developer (very green, might get the boot). I am also the janitor, cook, pet carer, housekeeper.

I’m not even close to being Mr. Torrence, but I’ve been staying away from the water heater.

 

*I know that isn’t true, but you know that this is how it feels.

100 DoC: hiccups

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I had a plan, man. I’ll call the plan Stan. Stan had a plan: expan’. 

The project I was working on grew as other ideas came in. When that happens, I know it’s best to give it a rest. Let the ideas come in, take notes, do something else. I’m cool with that. My project; my rules. 

Part of the project required my drawing little things, so that takes more time than just building a wee code. 

Here’s my cursor to give you a hint of my fantastic art skills at work:

Part of having too much fun with code is letting it get out of hand. I don’t care. This is code, not a trip to Vegas. The fishy project will come soon. 

Still, I wanted to have a code done, so I cheated in a way. I returned to old homework to make it neater or add more to it. I started with my “vanilla to-do”. I won’t add a link. It’s not that fun yet. Just believe me (belieeeeeeve me) that I added check boxes for when I complete a task. When I get stuck on a DoC project again, I’ll return to this to-do list to add windows.localstorage. And once it’s all done, I’ll build a new one from scratch with Ajax and jQuery. 

Some days just are sluggish. This was one. I’m just glad that I didn’t find comfort in a pint of ice cream. Win! (not really)

100 DoC: Day One

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Yesterday I walked from the Blanton Museum to my home, which is about 1.5 miles south of Ben White. I was going to run, but I was too tired. Will I count that as exercise? Hells to the yeah power. 

And I’m counting today as day one, too. I did not think I was going to start today. I was trying to get my portfolio set up (in a skeletal sort of way) and was running out of time to do a wee bit of code. Nearly defeated. Nearly. Until I had my “cotton-pickin’ moment” moment (often called a copimomo among the cool kids). Building the portfolio counts as coding. Walking 8 miles instead of running 3 counts, so fussing about with the portfolio, html, css, and Sass count. It wasn’t what I had planned, but there were blisters and sweat. Just as much. 

It’s a complete do-over. This 100 Days is a new repository. The older one has been renamed MinPens-WiddleFiddles, which will be for wee wee bits. We’re talking wee, weally wee. And they cannot count for 100 Days. If anything, they can be my warmups. My stretches. My kicks. Because I’m 47:

100 derps of code

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Why not decide to commit to 100 Days of Code just before starting my final project? WHY THE HELL NOT?!? I’ll have all the time in the world. Sure, I can do it. Just wee bits of code. Nothing huge. A min-Pen here or widdle-Fiddle there. 

I’m the derp in purp:

Instead of starting where I left off, it’s time to recommit. And re-plan. My three months in a coding school are done. Everyday something new for the most part. Some topics feel like I learned them years ago. Do I start at the beginning? Start at a topic with A and go down the alphabet? Do wee bits or larger projects? Everyday the same or different days with different formats? Always digital or the occasional mind-mapping with crazy pen and ink? So many ideas.

I’m down to a few ideas. I’m going to commit by the end of tomorrow’s second cappuccino. You have no idea how that kind of commitment gives me the shakes.

100 Days of Code coming up, but tonight is day 0. zzzzz

me make-um sum ipsum

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Since deep in my heart, I’m learning to code to afford my greyhound addiction (let’s be honest), I thought I should have my own filler text. 

When my Brians* get stuck, we have a faculty meeting semi off topic. I know what I have to do next on my final project, but it’s still at the back of the tongue, not the tip. You know, close to the uvula, where no ideas should stay. Instead of letting it trigger my gag reflex, I roam the interwebs. Videos of kittens and alpacas could lead me astray, so I stick to topics related to coding: Codepen posts, blogs on coding (functions and styles), and then I play my coding version of word association: I have some fun and make sum ipsum.

Greyhound ipsum:

Retired racers borzoi fabian merlin, farts couch potato chipper Azawakh stan companion merlin. Magyar agr tongueout blue white and black rooing affectionate, affectionate couch potato fast iris flash. Dark red knitting teefers saluki galgo black brindle affectionate cali. Light brindle afghan shane, couch potato toofs white roxy Chart Polski  dark red booty full of tooty VAGA. Pixie dark brindle athletic toofs gentle jaime couch potato Hortaya Borzaya otto. Moby sugar roofest otto rooing roxy luna hound Silken Windhound. Sloughi kate tongueout athletes athletes beatrice escaped tongue syndrome. Jaime luna jenny blue brindle red brindle, blue brindle black and white siggie companion stan baby pie chipper. Sloughi intelligent white roxy noosa knitting luna.

Red fawn light brindle kate GALT happy tail Irish wolfhound, jelly dana fast grapehounds. Dewey grapehounds regal otto otto chipper noosa hound. Dark brindle henry red brindle booty full of tooty blue greyhound Sloughi jenny Irish wolfhound. Farts GPACenTex jenny teefers happy tail pixie Hortaya Borzaya black brindle booty full of tooty. Galgo tongueout companion frito feeto Primley Sceptre light brindle Scottish Deerhound. Nigel buggers cockroaching tongueout farts white and brindle tick retired racers Silken Windhound roxy jack. Siggie light red fawn fast cockroaching retired cody omo moby sugar. Tongueout roxy shane red fawn Sloughi hound, retired racers henry sighthound escaped tongue syndrome jack black. Derp jaime henry merlin beatrice tongueout rooing.

James River Greyhounds shane athletic hound fawn iris cali. Fawn Sloughi booty full of tooty baby pie red brindle jaime GPACenTex Scottish Deerhound jack. Farts light red fawn tamale beaker escaped tongue syndrome tongueout, affectionate black fabian dark brindle cody.

*I saw “fried brians” on a menu once, and every since, I like to refer to my cogitating blob of fat as Brians. There’s more than one Brian, of course. How else would I have faculties?

My favourite therapists: Fat Bastard and Fabian

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Coding bootcamp has been intense. I’ve had some really hard weeks when I doubted my ability to do the simplest tasks. I looked around  at a house that needed repairs and dreaded every new crack. I’ve had my kitchen and utility room flood, an emergency vet visit for Fat Bastard (I think he tried to suck face with a young opossum), and the smaller things that life flings our way.

I love it. I do. But I would not be saying this without my live-in therapists who have kept me company and never once cared what the house looked like. Fabian is getting a new greyhound sibling when I’m settled. Until then, code code code ear-scritch code.

No photos of Fat Bastard. His face is pretty banged up, and even at 16 he is pretty vain.

100 Days of Code: forEach and every one of you

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Confession: I missed a day. Busy Friday of planning my final project and topping it off with dinner and drinks with one of my former 4th graders. NO REGRETS!

I’m currently just picking array methods that pop into my head and working on doing them without thinking about their form. While mindless, it’s just to get that muscle memory down. I give no schittes about fanciness. I think of this as riding my motorcycle around my neighbourhood slowly and deliberately. Not at all sexy but totally necessary. If I were still playing soccer, I’d get the ball out and dribble or find a wall to bounce against. Again, not sexy, but necessary. I would like to reserve the thinking for planning, more complex functions, and finding out where Steve Buscemi showers.