Tag: coding

Thinking About Code

Carl Setzer
a man and a woman using their laptop in a bar

My fellow blogger and online friend Bernie Michalik posted today “On futzing around with code“. A key thing for me was the reminder about how much I enjoy coding. To be clear, coding is most enjoyable when it WORKS. Over the years, I’ve had a lot of fun building programs, tweaking things, and exploring how it all works.

Currently, though, I struggle with coding. It is deeply frustrating when it doesn’t work. As I step back and look, I see it’s challenging some of my deepest insecurities. Computer programming is for “smart” people, and I have some deep insecurities around this. More things to work out, I see.

So, when the code doesn’t work, it rattles those old fears, those old pains. Then I get angry and frustrated quickly, driving me to quit my project. My stubborn streak often brings me back, and I never regret coming back and getting it to work (I guess two negatives do make a positive). Figuring out these bugs makes me feel like a wizard. It’s amazing! But the downs are awful.

I think when I decided to study web application development, with the goal of launching the next part of my career there, I put a huge amount of pressure on myself. That robbed much of the fun. If every time I’m building something, I’m focused on how this will help build a programming career. When I’m in a beginners mind, curious, having fun and not concerned about the end product, coding is still fun.

Reflecting on Bernie’s post, I think I need to dive back into code, but focus on having fun. Just enjoy the work, the journey.

Drink Water Project

Carl Setzer

Today’s “50 Projects In 50 Days” project: Drink Water. Always good advice, but that’s not what this is. This one lets the user click on the number of glasses of water one has consumed, and gives you back an animated graphic. You can check it out here.

After each project, I feel more confident with my coding. However, my questions grow. For instance, I wonder, though, how much more of vanilla web dev (html, css, javascript) I want to explore. Do I want to focus exclusively on web development? Or do I want to add the almighty Python to my list of languages? I’m unsure.

Additionally, I still see my super-power as a project manager/coordinator. As much as I’m enjoying coding, will that ever be the place I make the biggest impact? I’m unsure. Funny, in a way, that after all this web development work, recruiters till reach out to me regarding my executive assistant skill set. For a dying industry (exec support), I’m getting a LOT of interest in this skillset. Such is life, I guess. Keep growing, keep learning, see what comes.

Incrementing Counter: Another 50 Projects In 50 Days Project

Carl Setzer
Coding on a computer screen

You’ve seen these types of counters, ones that zip up to some total at some speed. Well, that’s what this project is. This is one that I can easily see a use case for. Also, it was a lot of fun.

An interesting realization: coding gives me energy. I was feeling rather worn and fatigued when I started this project. At the end, I felt invigorated. There’s some good learning here…just got to figure out what it means.

Update on 50 projects in 50 days

Carl Setzer
data codes through eyeglasses

So, I took the past couple of days off. I was exhausted after work Thursday, then had long work days Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So, I did two today! Fortunately, they weren’t too complicated. That brings me to day 5.

Today’s first project is titled “Hidden Search Widget“. A very simple project, where we make a search box that expands or contacts (no search functionality yet).

My second project today is “Blurry Loading“, where an image loads blurry, and comes into focus while a countdown timer counts.

Fun projects which are helping refine my HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge. I am working towards bettering my coding skills. Slowly but surely growing. Check out my developer site for more details.

50 Projects in 50 Days: Day 3

Carl Setzer5 Comments

Completed day 3 of the 50Projects in 50Days course, “rotating navigation”. This one rotates the whole page if you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left. Hard to imagine a use case, but it’s really fun.

I’ve been posting these to my recently re-done Github site. Again, I’ve done three of these:

With Expanding Cards, when you click on individual cards, they expand out, and the other ones shrink. For Process Steps, it’s like a progress indicator. Each time you press the “next” button, the line advances one over. And for Rotating Navigation, when you click on the hamburger icon, the web page rotates, showing the navigation buttons. For me, this is fun stuff. Which is good since it’s now 9:30 at night and I still haven’t eaten dinner yet.

Anyway, it feels good to refresh my knowledge and build out these skills. I feel it’s a critical part of my march into a tech career. Plus, the internet and web development are the future of tech. I intend to do one project per day every day, but we’ll see. I have a few things coming up that may cause a day or two to be lost. But I should have not problem keeping this moving forward.

Wish me luck!

Growing as a web developer

Carl Setzer
numbers projected on face

So, I finished a associates in web application development back in June. My skills are ok, but pretty basic. I realize I want to code better. As I’m working on being more proactive, I opted to sign up for some Udemy courses. Right now, I’m working on 50 Projects in 50 Days. This one focuses on expanding my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The first two projects were basic, but I needed that. Rattling through the rust. Plus, my typing has gotten…lame. I used to be highly accurate. Coding, though, is petty and will fail by missing one character, a space, a semicolon. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is simply finding the error.

So, I’ve completed two so far:

With this, I updated my hand-coded site on Github’s free service (check it out here). I’m posting these projects here, as well as in my github repository for these projects.

Part of me wants to significantly up my coding game. Perhaps event to the point of being able to take part in a hackathon. However, I am trying to juggle several things and we’ll see how far down this rabbit hole I venture.

PHP and WordPress

Carl Setzer
phplogo

This quarter I’m studying PHP at Edmonds College. Many of my classes have a cumulative project that we build towards over the quarter. For this class, we’ll be creating plugins for WordPress. I’m pretty excited as I’ve used WordPress for years and deepening my knowledge will be fantastic. Hopefully, I’ll get enough knowledge to come up with creative ideas.

 

Coding, Frustration and Euphoria

Carl Setzer
Developer-coding

Spent today finishing up my first assignments coded with PHP. It’s interesting to me how the expectations have evolved. I’m getting to the point that, even though I’ve never done anything in PHP, that I can look at existing code and decipher its intent, then adjust the code accordingly. I did need some of my instructor’s “hints”, but not much. It was pretty cool to be able to just read my text, open up the code, and tweak it to get the desired results. Again, this is the first chapter of the book, my first set of projects, so still pretty basic. But, I’m feeling more confident as a coder every day.

This is balanced with moments of complete bewilderment. Over the course of one project, I had several moments where I just wanted to scream at my screen. One moment, trying to get some if/elseif statements to work. After the better part of an hour, I finally deleted the whole thing and re-coded it…and it worked! I haven’t any idea what I did differently. That’s one of the things with code: a wrong letter case, dropping one character, one symbol, and the whole thing will not work.

Getting it to work is an amazing feeling. Balanced by the frustrations of the damn thing not working at all.

Glaciers, Coding and My Social Media Feeds

Carl Setzer2 Comments

So, earlier today this video appeared in my YouTube feed:

Then this popped up in my LinkedIn Feed:

Tracking the effects of glacial melting at the top of the world

I’m sure Jung would label this synchronicity, but I don’t know what the universe is trying to tell me with this. Anyway, I found the coincidence fascinating.