From Craft to Code

Though my time at The Iron Yard has come to it's final end (after graduation, after career development, and after Demo Day) and I have come out a whole new person. I have a newfound confidence that I never knew I was capable of before. I've overcome so many of my personal fears and feel like I am a stronger person now that I have challenged myself in a field I previously felt I didn't belong in. The road ahead is going to continue to be difficult as a I find my way in but I know I can handle it and for the first time in a long time I am proud of what I have accomplished. The LGBT redesign will be a continuous project I work on with the Center until we implement the new look. I still have the Corky's Kettle Corn site to update as well. In between those projects I continue to update my previous projects by writing well crafted READMEs, refactoring old code, adding new features, and implementing unit testing. With so many new tools available to me I know it is only a...

After spending a considerable amount of time doing market research, analysis, client feedback, community polls, and even a SWOT analysis of the current site Kelly and I were able to move from a rough sketch of a redesign to a cleaned up mockup all the way to a high fidelity prototype! It is still a work in progress but we are able to code in HTML and CSS a functional mockup to display our redesign. We used tools along the way to keep track of our progress like Trello as well as Balsamiq to complete our sketches. Our prototype is available on Github at  https://github.com/victoriarainc/lgbtCenterofRaleigh . Kelly was able to find a Bootstrap layout called Modern Business that implemented a lot of the styles we had in mind for the site. It is already responsive, much more modern, and introduces clean navigation throughout the site. The prototype is still in progress but we hope to have it completed by next week!

On top of the LGBT Center's redesign I have now also been commissioned for a redesign of the Corky's Kettle Corn's website. They are a local kettle corn business that wants a larger online presence in order to expand and increase revenue. I will not only be in charge of client communication but design and development of their website using a few tools I haven't ever worked with before. The site itself is currently build on ZenCart and php - a software I've never used and a language I've never seen. However, I'm confident I can execute a satisfying template and implement it in a reasonable timeframe. I'm really excited to start learning more tools that will make me a more effective coder and freelancer! This is only a sketch of a splash page but it is a start! I hope it will inspire me over the next few weeks to continue to update and modernize Corky's website!

As my graduation date slowly approaches I now have the freedom and the tools to start building my own applications from scratch. I came into this program three months ago knowing I wanted to build web pages for my photography and handmade crafts. Now I finally can! Even better, I can create a portfolio app that showcases all of these new skills as well as my personal projects. For the last couple of days I went ahead and dived into Handmade by Vi - a responsive website that dynamically displays available products and service using React, HTML, and CSS. My first steps were to sketch out a rough idea of how the application was going to look. I picked three colors, created a layout for each page, and loosely linked how the navigation was going to render. In a few hours I was able to develop the barebones and functionality of my site. I chose some pretty simple and clean designs,  added a media query to handle mobile view, and implemented a few dynamic routes for my 'shop' page...

This past week has been a more in depth look into React. It turns out there are many different ways to approach compartmentalizing code. Organizationally, React likes to keep everything in components. This way code can be written for a specific section, including its logic, its HTML, and its styling, all in one place that is separate from the rest. These components are likely to still be a piece of the whole page so in order to avoid typing the same code over and over there are a few different approaches. Inheritance is exactly as it sounds, small components can inherit properties from the section it is inside of or the larger component around it. Just like last week, these properties are passed down in the constructor. They can include defined variables, functions, or even state. In a way, inheritance is a method of linking the separated components together to allow for more reusable code. Children components are very similar. Some properties can still be passed down to childr...

Security is a huge topic in tech. As technology progresses so does cyber security. I know basically nothing about it either! However, we did learn about encrypting passwords yesterday and tried our hand at two different ways to do so. One package is bcrypt and another is Password. I played around with each and the biggest difference is that Password allows for logging in through twitter or facebook. Pretty neat, right? I didn't get the chance to play around with it that much though. I did local encryption instead. This all still looks foreign to me but a great benefit of Node.js is the ability to use these packages when you need them with the code you already have. As I get more comfortable with the language I'll be able to create a multi-page application with authentication, validation, and password encryption!

Last week we covered databases! Super exciting, right? It only makes sense, though, that the majority of back end development would be storing, accessing, and updating data. There are quite a few tools available for Node.js and the ones we covered are Mongo and Mongoose. Mongo or MongoDB itself stores data flexibly. Why does that flexibility matter? It is perfect for sets of data that are incomplete. If I had a list of contacts I wanted to store but I didn't have everyone's emails it wouldn't be a big deal - those email addresses would just be empty. Mongo stores the data and Mongoose is a tool that accesses it for you. This is the secure way to retrieve data and validate it rather than having potentially sensitive information stored right in the code for anyone to see. Mongoose is pretty straightforward to use and I implemented it into my robots database (that thing again!). In a nutshell, I was able to swap out the database I had stored in a file and put it into Mongo o...

There seems to be a lot of debate around what Model View Controller (MVC) is. After almost 48 hours of discussion, intense Googling, and furious debate I believe I can comfortably say that MVC is a way to organize your code. To compare, there are dozens of ways to organize a craft room. On top of those dozens of ways you could think of to organize your stuff - there are overarching theories and methods to help. I've read articles on the psychology of organization and popular methods such as bundling your stamps based on theme versus month of the year you would use it. MVC is a method of organization for programmers. Keep in mind a lot of the implementation is dependent on the project itself. Also, a programmer's code is personal and nothing beats methods that work for that programmer. With that in mind, MVC attempts to propose an ideology to follow. Model can be a folder to store sets of data and any logic used to filter through that data. View's purpose is to hold any vi...

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...

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...

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...