From Craft to Code

As I dived into learning back end development there have been a lot of concepts thrown at me at once. There is a certain amount of information about how the web works (sending and retrieving information) that is helpful to learning a backend language. There is the actual backend language to learn including unique commands and syntax. There are also tons of packages that have various purposes. Each aids in different tasks that execute code differently. Think tools in a toolbox. They're all tools but each one does a unique task. After those packages are installed in your project they still need to be required. Once they are required, they still need to be turned 'on' and that is my boilerplate code. Then the real code happens. The logic. The problem solving. Code really is a puzzle and I find myself stuck on the last piece all the time!

The last 48 hours have been super intense! Not only am I learning basic web concepts about how information is sent and received over the internet but also the language used to manipulate that information. Those languages are also built on packages which are chunks of code called modules. Those packages all have their own syntax that may or may not interact well with other packages that are needed. My best analogy (roughly) is trying to create a custom greeting card for a customer. I have dozens of stamps and dozens of paper punches (these are analogous to modules because they are pre-made tools I use to create an embellishment that is then used in addition to my other crafting skills that make the card). These stamps and punches were all purchased at different places so not all of the styles and shapes line up with one another. I have to use a specific method to make those 'packages' work together to produce the card I have in mind. All of this code is completely done in th

After learning the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, Terminal, and GitHub I'm now moving into back end development! Our first reading is on Node.js which is neither a language nor a program but a way for the JavaScript language to interact with browsers. I'm not entirely sure what that means yet but I'm confident I will by the end of the day. Until then, I'm working on our latest weekly project. It is a search page that uses the iTunes API to find music! The hardest part so far has been figuring out how to play audio and that was ultimately easier than I expected. I'm very fortunate to be learning how to code now with HTML5 and CSS3 that have a lot of included tags and elements. Back in the day I'm sure these projects would have been much more intensive! Here I have some JavaScript that begins a function when a search result is clicked. Once it has been clicked, the audio file is plugged into the HTML (hardcodes it) and displays the artist's name

If you haven't heart already - The Iron Yard went public on Thursday that it's locations will be shutting down after all current students complete their courses. This, naturally, impacted a lot of us emotionally but I know, for myself, that I'm still in this to learn as much as possible. I'm incredibly lucky that the staff here has built the Raleigh campus together and they also will stick this out until the end. Outside of that, this week was the final week of front end development before we move on to back end. Thursday and Friday we broke into groups and were inspired to begin our Hackathon project. Our theme was 'Mashup' so my team decided to do an arcade style page with multiple mini games. I, specifically, offered to do a Choose Your Own Adventure Game. I chose to write a 'tour' of Iron Yard's Raleigh campus. After a greeting and an input field for your name, you enter each room as you choose. The tricky part was to make sure that once a room

As we round out our month of front-end development (I can't believe it we've come this far) our final task is to collaborate on a project. We've been challenged to complete a 48 hour Hackathon with the theme of 'Mashup'. My group has picked an arcade-style page that includes multiple mini games that are all interactive and show off various skills we've learned. My particular mini game is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, or as it turns out, a Tour of Iron Yard with Stacey our Campus Director! I'm not as advanced as I would like to be but the logic I implemented to complete the task worked! It got pretty messy pretty fast but I was able to accomplish a series of alerts nested in one another. My tour is three rooms long and once you 'enter' a room it can not be reentered. I did this using nested if statements linked to dialogue boxes with template literals. This worked great but if I ever decided to add additional rooms it would get close to impossib

Last night our daily assignment was to create a web page from scratch. It's super easy now to auto populate some simple HTML and complete the organization of the page through DOM manipulation in JavaScript. The difficult part was using fetch to pull data out of an API in order to display search results. I did it though! Once the class realized that there was some extra security going on and we needed to read the next day's lesson to learn about CORS we got it all sorted out. I made the colors pretty obnoxious just for fun. I'm starting to get the hang of the hover styling in CSS. I also just discovered google's color picker! Just search 'color picker css' and there at the top of the page is a sliding bar that allows you to manipulate the color in the box. That color coordinates with a hexadecimal code or rgb set of numbers that CSS understands. Voila! Beautiful colors that aren't super generic! I'm still pretty rusty on the fetch method of request

As we're going through new material I've started to rely heavily on our reading as a resource. My objective throughout the day isn't to be able to build code from scratch by myself - it's to know what resources to use to do it. Half of the battle is knowing what tools you need and the other is how to implement it. If I can figure it out using the reading from the night before I know I'm doing something right. Some of the students are reaching the part of overwhelmed that I hit my first day. They had previous background in HTML and CSS so they breezed through the first three weeks and now feel stuck. It sounds condescending to recommend the night's reading to them but that's how I've been getting through the whole time. Take, for example, XMLHTTPRequests. After the reading and the lesson I learned they facilitate the process of my code retrieving data from another 'location' on the web. Knowing when I want to use an XMLHTTPRequest and how to wri

It's my birthday! But it's also Monday so I'm back to programming just like any other week. I'm ahead, for now, and spent the weekend working on a personal project! Instead of sketching it out like I know I should I jumped right in and expanded on my project until I got stuck. Then, instead of working out that knot in my code I just jumped into another project instead. Probably not best practice here. On nights and weekends I'm still crafting and practicing photography. I'm trying to build a site for each of those. Ultimately, what I would like to do is build just one single site that ties both hobbies together. I don't have anything down on paper yet but I'm willing to bet I will tonight. As these sites progress I'll update on my bugs and how I worked through them. Right now, on my photography page, I'm have the hardest time getting my images to work properly. I have them embedded in my HTML just fine but CSS is a different kind of cranky. I c

Never have I ever put so much thought into how a calculator works. Our weekly assignment, due this upcoming Friday, is to create a static webpage that will display a green calculator that not just looks pretty but functions correctly. The looking pretty is HTML and CSS which we covered a grand total of two weeks ago and I'm already feeling rusty on. The functionality is all JavaScript. I seriously can't believe that in three weeks I'm already familiar with and using (kind of awkwardly) these three languages. In about five hours time I accomplished all of the above. I have green buttons that when pushed are displayed in the empty field at the top of the page as well as can mathematically work (as long as the operation is simple and done one step at a time). For now my GitHub link is  https://github.com/victoriarainc/week-03-project  but I will update later this week with the actual page so you can interact with my code! Yay progress! All in all I'm super proud but

JavaScript is if loops, DOM manipulation, template literals, nested arrays and objects, and a load of new commands I have literally never worked with or even seen before last week. Here I am feeling like I've taken the first baby step (a huge step!) in to the right direction. I can actually start a project, ask the right questions, and use the correct resources. I may not be able to finish. It may take me all day. But I can start and I'm not going to take that achievement for granted. https://victoriarainc.github.io/week-02-project/ This page isn't beautiful or interactive but all that was required of me was to print those same answers to the console (a tool in Chrome you can access by right-clicking on that page and clicking 'Inspect'). Before submitting I realized my page was just completely empty. A white page. Which is what my instructors are expecting but I didn't want to settle for that. I had a few extra hours last night and spent that time 'd

Coding is all a logic game. I've discovered it's using tools in conjunction to produce a result. Brain teaser doesn't even begin to describe it! My head feels like a swarm of bees caught in tiny net trying to solve this one! https://github.com/victoriarainc/blackjack If you take a look at the link you'll see a program (well, a bunch of notes that resemble some bizarre string of consciousness) that calculates the total of your digital hand in the game of Blackjack. I've never thought so critically about the value of a card before! Throwing in the curveball of Ace being one of two values depending on your cards really throws me for a loop. Taking it one step at a time is key though and something I definitely need to improve on. This bit of JavaScript isn't quite as crafty as some other very visual aspects but it is still super addictive! In the same way solving a word search is though. I'm completely infuriated until I finally find the word I haven&#

In the midst of being completely floored by today's content going over my head, template literals are shining through the confusion. DOM modification itself I was pretty fuzzy on for a while. Then I came across a real world reason to do so! I learned that you would want to write HTML in your JavaScript file in order to link JavaScript to specific elements in your HTML! How would you do that? By creating a template literal that not only created the HTML that doesn't already exist but to nest commands and links inside of it that only Javascript can understand. This makes your page much more dynamic and allows for content to change easily without rewriting any code. For all of my crafters out there, this is equivalent to making a stencil! Image you want to draw a speech bubble around every month in your bullet journal. You could try to draw one around each month and hope that you get a similar size and shape. Or you could just make a single stencil (I've been 3D printing

My post yesterday was so easy going and relaxed I just had to update today. Yesterday was hard. Yesterday was hours of pseudo coding and talking out concepts and searching through our reading materials for hints. We've moved into DOM and integrated for loop concepts. The giant, looming brick wall was also combining last week's knowledge of how a <form> is structured in HTML. Well, on top of constantly checking syntax and never knowing where in these four concepts our code was faulting. A fellow student and I worked together when we realized we were at similar points in the learning curve. The task itself seemed pretty simple but if you read my .js file here:  https://github.com/victoriarainc/form_builder  than you can actually read in the comments under "the long way" the thought and problem solving I put into trying to reconstruct a dynamic input form. As in, a form that had the proper space for me to input the different types of information. I understood

It's only Tuesday of this week and my head is already at capacity. We're quickly moving into more JavaScript by going over DOM (Data Object Model) today. It's essentially a way to write HTML without writing HTML. The concepts seemed pretty straightforward in the reading last night. When you want to target an element by it's class, there is a command for that. When you want to target a whole document, there is a command for that! I feel optimistic about today's activities and I'm looking forward to some of the crazy JavaScript commands that can do funky effects on my pages! Until then, I've found a resource I'd love to share! I'm definitely a 'gold star' learner and love to see my 'progress' tracked. CodeCombat is a wonderful interactive game for beginners of almost every age. You control your character in the command line and complete certain tasks with given commands. If you haven't played yet I highly recommend it! Just l

This weekend was supposed to be a retreat into beloved hobbies while I felt ahead in content for The Iron Yard. I achieved this goal on Saturday by going to a local Stamp Art Tour here in Raleigh and buying more than I needed but certainly less than I expected! After organizing all my new product and setting my self up to craft last night I thought I would spend all day today making cards and scrapbooking. Instead, I find myself working on index cards, rewriting my notes to look prettier, and knocking out enough changes on my side project to push a commit to github! Currently, I have a facebook page with a small collection of albums that hold some of my pictures. It's pretty much a super informal portfolio:  https://www.facebook.com/viphotography.raleigh/ . It certainly isn't a terrible way to go about displaying past work. But it isn't the greatest. As a way to both improve my brand and practice my development and design skills I've started to build my own page. I kn

This week has been the week of a Tuesday holiday; both incredibly short and surprisingly long! I've been consistently on top of my work out of habit, thankfully, but I'm ready for material that I feel solid on. I guess in a way I should embrace this uncomfortable feeling that I don't understand what I'm doing as technology itself is never just one thing and constantly evolves. As we get more into JavaScript I will be excited to see how to actually use it in my HTML and CSS. So far we've mostly covered concepts like truthy/falsey, if statements, if/else statements, and pushing to git pages. Compared to last week it feels like we barely covered anything but I'm happy to take this step by step now. The weekly project was a challenge but I knew myself well enough to space out the web page one piece at a time. All of the concepts I thought would be difficult, like parallax and favicon, were unbelievably easy. Yet I still feel shaky on when to use flex and when to u

Now that we're in Week 2 we've gotten into a more secure, more custom routine that fits our cohort's needs. Rather than jumping into new material every day we have an opportunity in the morning to both go over the previous day's activity and to bring up any questions we had about the reading material for today's lesson. I've also had the opportunity to confront my learning curves: the first week I was learning SO much more than just the given material. I was not only grasping the first concepts of git, pushing to github, basic html, and css but also how to use a mac, what shortcuts I have available, how to work in the command line, how to learn in the flipped classroom model, AND generic programming vocabulary that doesn't actually line up very well with English definitions of the same words. We've been given a week assignment to turn in by this Friday but I went ahead and jumped into it over the weekend. I've only worked on one page so far but I f