Programmer's Progress

Well, we officially don't have to blog, do progress reports, or (presumably) even show up at 9 am anymore.

Just try to stop me.

Interesting thing of the day: the new class arrived. Did we look so adorable and naive on our first day? It really does feel like basic in a lot of ways, again notably in the way that a person (or group) can so markedly change in a few short weeks. It feels like forever ago that I was writing nonsense ruby code, like everything is a for loop! Huzzah!, and now I get mildly angry every time I have to write a for loop in JS.

Another interesting thing I noticed today: I just don't give a damn about reddit. It's been a while now that I haven't found it so interesting, but today there was absolutely. nothing. I cared about. I guess I've transitioned, and it's now time to start reading HN regularly?

There's so many things I could be doing now that it can be hard to know where to start. I've been doing meta-work: getting my hosting set up (it turns out Dreamhost has a lot of the same restrictions as Heroku, viz. spinning down server instances if they haven't been accessed in a while, so I guess I will have to get a pingdom account regardless), getting some documents together, etc. Planning is a big thing; I think I'm going to have to live by a routine over the next three weeks+, moreso than even before, which means identifying overarching tasks that deserve attention and then tending to them at regimented times.

One thing that was made abundantly clear last week is that I can't keep not working out. I have the damn bike setup right here! But... I have no motivation to deal with it in the morning, and that's no excuse at all, especially with a) how much my back hurts by the end of the evening and b) how bad for your health sitting, in any shape, is supposed to be.

A fun part of today: I pulled my resume from dropbox, then rendered it in HTML + CSS, and explored a lot of sub-topics that had tickled my fancy during this course that I hadn't yet had time to look into. I have a whole list of things that I've learned, and a whole list of things that I could spend time learning (pandoc anyone?), but what I learned today is that flexible styling knocks the pants off document-based styling, as in Word or InDesign. I'm sure they have their strengths, but when all you have is JavaScript, every problem looks like it calls for selectors.

One funny though from today: there are so many different file formats for presenting structured text. I wonder if it would be possible to extract a universal grammar for them all.

Well, not much to say... Today was presentation day, and I spent most of the day bug chasing, trying to get core features to work the way they needed to work and not the broken ways they had been. I feel like Javascript has more instances of dodgy edge behavior than any other language that I've worked in...

Afterward, my peers and I spent a good amount of time talking about previous classes' projects. We thought, two weeks ago, that other people's projects weren't very good, but we came out today understanding just how hard it is to produce production-quality code in a short time period.

I pretty much faceplanted on the presentation portion of the day. I want to go back to this project, to finish it up, but I know it can take as much time as I'm willing to give it over the next three weeks, or I can find other projects to also work on... time management will become even more important over this last period. Thankfully, we don't have to go in until 10:30 Monday, and this weekend will be a much appreciated break from the slog that was the project week(s), but ... what will my portfolio look like? The pace doesn't ever end. What next? I have a book on Objective C, and an Arduino kit here, and I know that my portfolio might be able to say a lot about me, but what do I want it to say.

Spent most of the day today trying to make up for lost time, which doesn't really work but most of the day I had that level of speed. I left the office at 11:00 last night and midnight tonight, and got in a half-hour late this morning because there just isn't enough time.

A benefit to overthinking everything and going down blind alleys is that my bug-hunting skills are only getting better. After three productive hours prior to lunch doing... I barely remember, but something... I tried doing something a bit too clever (having to do with separation of concerns again), and didn't come up for air until after 6. From 6 to midnight I was plenty productive, but messing up like that still stings.

In brief: I monkey-patched the Backbone Router prototype to offer callbacks before and after routing, and then tried using those hooks to grab a user who wasn't logged in and redirect them to the login page (while preserving state). Once again, on my way home, I think I understand what I was doing wrong, and can see how to fix it, but I ended up ripping most of that code out and leaving it basically exactly how we were taught in the auth demo.

I still don't like having a currentUser global, but for my app it's not a terrible idea, since you need to have some purpose coming to a blackboard-like site. It's not like your typical modern website, where there's generally some functionality that's meaningful even without an account, so... whatever.

Oh, so I remember now—one of the fastest ways to make me hate your website or app is to have data entry be painful. So I spent three hours making syllabus creation absolutely beautiful, modulo a couple tweaks, and ran into a bug that I couldn't figure out even with Tommy's help. Basically, I had the event creation success callback call a JQuery focus() event on the first field in the form, and it kept losing focus after render. So I said to hell with it, and installed a setTimeout call that waits 50ms then focuses back on the first field. Hacky, but resilient.

No matter what I do, more of these sorts of hacks creep into my codebase. But then I see things like when iOS autocompletes a word, then you press punctuation, it backspaces and writes the punctuation and a space instead of just inserting it at the previous position.

I can't decide if this says more about the UX rot of iOS or the inevitability of hacky solutions.

Tomorrow we're presenting again and I think I'm going to bum rush the core features, no matter how they look, rather than polish anything. I have a TODO.md full of broken things, but that's just going to be the nature of the beast.

... about everyone having a slow day is that you can commiserate.

I spent a while this morning moving items out of my TODO list and into Trello—might as well use it for something now that I have an account. I found that trying to read to-dos off of a serial text file is next to impossible, and until I can afford a more full-featured project management app, it should do the trick. (Why is OmniFocus so expensive?)

From there I went down a rabbit hole of other people's code, doing a lot of thinking about separation of concerns and where and how views should interact, and how routers play into all that. The good thing is many people have asked themselves similar questions before; the bad news is that so many people have thought about it that there's no one good answer for how to address it, and Backbone is agnostic about the whole mess.

That was most of my day. I did read a lot of code and learned more and more about how Backbone actually works under the hood (as well as playing with a number of neat Underscore functions) but at the end of the day what I have to show for it is clickable column headers that update the sort order of their associated table, and some utility code ... not so much output.

Today was the .css assessment, and after working late (and falling asleep while working a few times) and doing the practice twice, then studying the solutions last night and this morning, I kicked ass.

To summarize: good design often has a logic, and good instructors are consistent, almost without fail. If there are exceptions, they are for a good reason - your instructor is working at the forefront of the field and the rules aren't established, the design language you're working with has some foibles that you have to work around.

In our case, I've managed to pick up on and benefit from the design habits of our CSS specialist, Jonathan, and have slowly been trying to incorporate them into my own design language. For instance, set consistent (and generous) margins/padding, keep visual space symmetrical, tend to favor making item borders on the inside and container borders on the outside, ... and so forth. I haven't built all of this into my site yet—it still looks like baby's first webpage, although thankfully not as 90s as all that—but there are a lot of things coming together very quickly.

Case in point: investing in figuring out backbone means that I've basically added three full collections, three full models, and half a dozen views to my app today alone. I also added two utility ... packages? files? to my app that enable some neat stuff, one that makes my life easier, and another that enables a pretty cool "live search" feature to the website.

Yeah, it's all pretty silly overall—I'm reinventing the wheel—but I know why and how I'm reinventing the wheel here, which is okay by me.

There's very little of what I'm doing that is really challenging now, which is okay after the weekend. To use a workout metaphor, this is my plateau, where I'm consolidating gains before looking for more of a training effect. Again, I'm okay with that.

Meanwhile, I'm able to explain to a lot of people what their code is doing wrong, or able to sort through arbitrary code and understand it pretty idiomatically; I'm much more confident with git and am aliasing my most common commands regularly, and can find my way around Atom like nothing.

I was actually going to post a partial update about my work over the weekend, but didn't manage to find the time. It might be a worthwhile task to do on my train commute, given that the normal sources of distraction are quite boring lately (although I suspect that others might think the same of my "content" on platforms such as fb).

Long story short: after running a couple errands on Saturday, I made it to the office by 6 pm, and worked straight through until about 2am, slightly tipsy and having learning a whole lot about how rails and backbone routes interact. There are a couple people who were here when I got here, and I had a very enriching time between talking through errors and feature development. I ended up bouncing a lot of ideas off of one guy in particular, and that helped me nail down a particularly complicated process that had been giving me fits.

Sunday, I woke up around 10 and started at the office around 2, and worked there for ten hours until the lack of running water in the building (long story) and the late hour drove me home. (I was also running on fumes, energy-wise). It was a long day of debugging, thinking through the backbone object model, and offering moral support to the other people working from the office.

I, by no means, have the most broken nor the most functional app, but I feel that I'm in a good place right now—which is good, since I'm setting my own pace :P I'm confident in the kernel of my project: every re-factor so far has been on the order of 5-20 lines of code, with a noticeably left-leaning Poisson distribution (i.e. more short patches than long).

Today, then, I woke up not sure what day it was, and I was somewhat disappointed to realize it was "only" Monday. When you work through the weekend, there's not much point trying to differentiate between each day. Nonetheless, today was better than a typical day at work, from my past life... this feels like just "what I do" now.

One thing that I like about the approach I've been taking toward development is that at every stage, my app works. I have yet to have a period, once I finished the core view, that adding a feature caused another feature to fail. Part of this is due to my deliberate approach to development, thinking through how the features will interact down the road, but most of it is due to a highly incremental process of grafting features on sensibly.

We were told about the Draper Gem pretty early on, and I didn't quite get it... I mean, I understand separation of concerns, but I didn't see the specific need for Draper.

I'm trying to take git very seriously, which means that every time I wrap up some context, I'll try to stage it separately and commit just that portion of the project. I was joking with someone today that others' commit messages consist of "Monday", "Tuesday", etc. I've made 55 commits (according to github) in the past two days, which is something. *party horn*

So, what'd I do today? Well, there was a bit of yak shaving today, although admittedly not as much as yesterday—I'm making a lot of progress learning the details I need to know to accomplish what I want to do—but there's always more to learn. Some time around lunch, I broke down and started trying to hammer out as much as I could as quickly as possible, and damn the looks... for the most part.

So, in terms of physics, my position is way behind where it could be—I'm jealous of the guy who's got robust rspec unit tests running—my velocity is just about what it should be, and my acceleration is going really well. I think... I have a hard time perceiving the struggles of the people around me, and seeing which things I'm doing better than them, but every time someone transitions from Rails to Backbone I get a bit more self-conscious.

This seems to be a theme with me.

It's not that bad. Honestly, most of the pressure I'm feeling comes from the instructors. I know they mean well, and I know I should work faster and get over some of my hangups, but ... I guess I'm overcoming my baggage in terms of how I attack problems. This is my problem and I'm personally invested in it, as opposed to some of the "toy" work we'd done, and I'm much more certain of the architecture and layout of all the tiny pieces. When I want to add something, I know which three files I need to tweak to make it happen (most of the time...), I open those windows, make those tweaks, commit, and am off to the races.

Contrast that with the general befuddlement I'd often experience when following along with some of the projects' specs. It's kind of nice.

Oh, I neglected to comment on my actual workflow. So, among the panes that I keep open are a small set of text files for "overall TODOs" (e.g. architecture and styling), for "upcoming TODOs", which are tasks that are a bit less ambitious than the first set but don't fit nicely into a smaller context (generally, I have 5-8 of these at a time), and then individual TODO: comments inside the source files. These last identify places where my code is broken but I can't do anything about it (I don't have the skills/time to fix it) or where there's an edge case that's known and I know how to address it, but it's not a priority at the moment.

This seems to be working pretty well for me, at least today. It certainly helps me shed the weight of tangential thoughts (helping me maintain focus on the matter at hand) and have a good place to go to feed me when I hit one of those transitional lulls.

By typing apparently you can email markdown. I don't know where the has to go. Like, on a line by itself?

or just starting a line?

I know you can send it in the subject, but that's for chumps.

We're all solo all the time from here on out.

Today was super interesting, and super... how to say it... introspective? Revealing? As mentioned, today was the beginning of two weeks of solo work on a single final project, and I spent a lot of time looking at myself, wondering, "what am I doing?"

An aside. We're working on CRUD projects—Create, Read, Update, Destroy—which describes in some way, shape, or form 90% of the web apps that people use. Sure, there are some flourishes, because the "things" in any given web page can be text, videos, votes, cats, whatever, but at the end of the day all that's being done is authentication followed by doing stuff to entries in a database and then serving content.

What makes CRUD apps interesting, then, is the content they provide and the interaction model they offer, as well as the way they integrate the data they have on hand. Stack overflow is a forum with sorting, at the end of the day, but there are layers on layers of customizations and social ... stuff they enable that makes them the foremost place for responses to technical questions on the (English-speaking?) web.

Getting to that point is always hard. A lot of the web is still non-RESTful phpBB systems and so forth, whereas what we've been learning is slightly more advanced and much more responsive (not in the screen scaling sense) than the pre-AJAX web.

Today, however, was straight up phpBB-level work. Which made it ... weird. It's one thing to be learning Rails for the first time and to know that you're not stopping there, but it's another thing entirely when you have to seriously examine a problem you want to solve knowing that it's just a waypoint on a long path. Needless to say, a lot of the romance has fallen off web technologies for me, now: everything seems pretty easy, in a way (despite my struggles to cover ground today, more on that later), and I'm much less impressed with most single-page apps, or even massive online presences. It all seems like "just" pushing bits around.

Sure, there's a lot to be said for impressive widgets, scaleability, and presentation, but my main bugbears on the modern web all come back to utility. When 90% of the single-page apps feel little more advanced than MS Word's outline view, what are people really doing? I think a new interaction model is due, but I don't know what it looks like. It will, of course, seem obvious in hindsight.

Back to the day, then. I know I was frittering away time, learning about advanced validations or how to be more succinct with Rails. Part of my introspection is realizing that I really do prefer small, focused tasks (bug hunting, making something tiny and super-polished) over architecting... but the model for this project is to cover as much ground as possible, showing off knowledge of many technologies and areas of study as possible. In a sense, breadth, not depth. I bet I could break any of our projects, two weeks from now, in ten minutes if not less—and that's just not the kind of problem solving I like. I'd rather make something tiny and robust than expansive and potentially brittle.

Am I missing the point of MVPs and Agile development?

Tomorrow, my goal will be to subsume my pickiness under the banner of covering ground - I will try to be picky over broader architectural issues. Does that even make sense? They're saying we should be working on Backbone by tomorrow, but I know I'll still be doing a lot of rails for much of the day.

Today: solo

Today's project was to create a web chat client using socket.io. Surprisingly, to me, I had a lot of fun doing this work—this sort of systems~ish programming is right up my alley. Massaging packets and managing client-server data processing is fun, once I figured out a couple questions about namespacing and the like.

In terms of "people won't remember what you said, only how you made them feel", I know that I had fun today... but between 5:30 and 8 pm, I made some changes that completely broke how the server handles command requests. I can change my user nick, and then immediately the socket closes, and a new socket is created, losing all the previous state. I managed, in just under two hours, to track down the call that's causing the error—something about calling socket.emit inside a particular logic branch—but I couldn't manage to kill the bug, and it's kind of driving me insane.

That said, this is one of the first projects in a long while that I want to keep working on even at the end of the day (as can be seen by my still being at the office after 8 pm). It was a ton of fun, which I can't seem to overemphasize despite my best efforts, but I have to throw in the towel. Maybe this will be something that I can keep working on after the final project.

Speaking of, today was the day that we had to present our initial wireframes to the instructors. Tommy sat down with me and my admittedly crappy, half-baked wireframes, and we walked through the app I'm going to spend the next two weeks creating. This is the really fun, really hard part, one because I keep having to rein myself in, and two because ... actually, that's it.

When it comes to large projects, I struggle to keep the scope of my work to a reasonable level, instead letting my ambitions smash up against the realities of implementation. This will either be an unmitigated disaster or a really excellent personal learning experience. I'm good at debugging and problem solving, but when it comes time to interview after this cycle is over, I don't want to have to say that my greatest weakness is that I don't know how to bite off only what I can chew.

Today's partner: Jake

Yes, you read that right. We didn't travel back in time; to the contrary, time keeps marching forward (despite the date overflow back to Jan 1).

Today was the day we put Jonathan's lectures on CSS to use. It was kind of funny; I made sure to do my best to read the lectures for the day last night, and by this morning not only had I been assigned a different partner, but the readings and project were different. It turns out that JT was putting some final touches on his version of the CSS day, and it was (I believe) a much more effective day than what I thought we would have been doing.

On a plus note, today was much more approachable than Backbone has been, for me. Boxing off elements and figuring out style hierarchies is something I'm capable of wrapping my mind around, and despite some of css' foibles it was easily in reach. Per usual, coming up with descriptive names for things was challenging—Jonathan is of the believe that you should add classes to DOM elements early in the design process, even though we often weren't sure what role something would be playing—but this is one of those times that the cmd-D shortcut, for selecting the next token in the source file, came in handy. You see, any time you decide that something isn't named quite right, you can simply find the first occurrence of that name in your source file and mash cmd-D to select subsequent items, then overwrite them all at once.

There's something very satisfying about using eight or more cursors to overwrite some chunks of text. :D

I'm not totally solid on CSS, but I am much more comfortable with it than I ever have been with Backbone. Really, I would not mind doing more of this—converting wireframes into semantic websites—but I know that this is not, by far, my strong suit. After all, I didn't have the skill to actually create a design from scratch, only to make it into semi-sane CSS, and I can't believe that that's a skill that's so much in demand that I can make my mark there.

It's fun, though :)