My Road to Code

Homeschooling & Learning to Code Remember back at the start of this journey that I said I would be happy if everyone was still alive and wearing clean pants by the end of the 16 weeks?!  Now homeschooling has been thrown into the mix too!  Thankfully my kids are 10 and 12 AND this is second time around so they pretty much know what they're doing.  It has meant a wee tweak to the 'schedule' here and there, I'm doing batch cooking for the week as much as I can on a Sunday so the time I would usually spend cooking first thing in the morning can be spent checking that they both know what they're working on that day.  And the time making the dinner in the evening can be spent checking that work!  Codeclan have also be great in adapting to the new routines that many of us have.  All classes are now being recorded so we can look back over any bit that we may have missed if we had to dive out and sort out technology failures/urgent questions/look at my picture ...

Week 11 I am so happy to be back to the routine of learning after the Christmas break.  This module is all about Java and I have had to wave goodbye to my beloved VS Code text editor in exchange for IntelliJ IDEA (which is an integrated Development Environment rather than a text editor - it has waaay more tools at its disposal).  I had that initial gulp of imposter syndrome - a new environment that I don't know my way around...Thankfully that feeling didn't last long - there are lots of new features that I will need to work my way through and become familiar with, but the bare bones are pretty much the same as VS Code.  I now need to go and find how to install my beloved bracket colouriser.... Typing colouriser there made me think back to starting coding and how unnatural it felt to be typing color rather than colour (for my non coding pals - CSS (lets us style webpages) is written in US English)- a few months down the line and it is creeping into my everyday writing and ...

New Year New Notepad! Yep, that's me all set and ready to resume week 11 of the 16 week Professional Development Course at Codeclan.  Thankfully our cohort is already fully remote so we won't have some of the upheaval that others will have following todays announcement.  Bert the Codeclan duck is at the ready to listen to me debug and notepad number 3 is ready and waiting to start the last module - Java.  But before I tell you about week 11, here's what we did in week 10!  Working 9 'til 5 That's the hoped for outcome of this weeks inputs!  No coding this week (well not during class time anyway)  This week it is all about creating the brand of 'Us'.  This has been a hugely intensive course so far and this week is already proving to be more of the same.  No rest when you're updating your Linkedin profile, writing your personal profile for your CV and prepping for mock tech interviews.  My To Do list is growing at a rate of a mile a minute! Wha...

It all comes together on Project Week... Well it turns out that these CodeClan instructors do actually know what they're talking about!  I must admit I may have narrowed my eyes in doubt when they uttered those words, but it turns out they were completely right. Working as a Team We were split up into groups, Team PikaVue (all will become clear) consisted of Myself , Michael Anderson , Chris Kite and Marc Downie .  We were given 4 briefs to choose from, we settled as a team on producing an app that featured a card game.  Specifically Pokemon!  We decided to use the poke api that gave us all 1000+ pokemon, images, moves, health and lots, lots more!  What's in a name? For my non tech buddies (and those who don't have a 10 year old son with a whole folder filled with Pokemon cards) - our team name PikaVue - courtesy of Chris - is a mix of Pikachu (cuddly wee yellow Pokemon) and Vue - the Javascript f ramework we were using to build our app. Agile Working We quickl...

  Promises, promises... That's all we seem to be hearing at the moment, dealing with Javascript's asynchronous nature.  Using a promise means that the app doesn't have to wait for requests to come from the server before running the rest of its code.  If there's a delay in the information we're looking for being sent back from the server this can result in the app hanging if we didn't have a promise to let the rest of the code run.  So what does the promise do?  It effectively says that when the information comes back it promises to do what you wanted with it (ie populate some data) or send up an error if there's a problem retrieving it. Okay, I hear you thinking, but what if you want that data to load up on the initial screen the user sees?  Are they going to be looking at a blank screen while the server and client are having their chat?  No! This is where Vue's mounted hook comes in - you write your promise in there and everything appears when the DOM...

  You spin me right round... Last week I was thrown back into the CodeClan washing machine of emotions!  I think I'm starting to get used to it now...spend 3 days being spun around not knowing up from down while new concepts are being hurled at us from all directions.  Day 4 is spent 'kind of' understanding the concepts and regaining your feet - sometimes with a cheeky extra spin thrown in when you think you've grasped something just to find out that there is yet ANOTHER dimension to it that you hadn't realised.  Day 5 is thankfully the day where you dust yourself down and realise that you DO understand what's going on ... and Breathe! We are about to embark on week 2 of Javascript and I am like a kid in a sweet shop with excitement! Once I had arrived at day 5 last week I couldn't stop, I LOVED weekend homework!  We had to create an HTML form and then create event listeners to display the information for the user once the form was submitted.  Waaay quicker...