Galen's Adventures in Programming

There are four weeks left in my time at Launch Academy, before I start the job application process and officially become a Junior Developer.  Next week we will be doing group projects, which will be run as a simulated work environment with one of our teachers as our Project Manager. During that time I will also be mapping out the gameplan for my 'breakable toy,' or my capstone project.   The most exciting part of this weekend has been reading Launch Academy's documentation for github, and coming to the realization that my past history with github is nowhere near 'best practices.'  This might not sound very exciting to anyone else, but it's always great to connect pieces of a puzzle that have always not-quite fit together.  Git branching is a simple process that git tries to streamline as much as possible, but it seems like every website had its own explanation and workflow.  An advantage to using git for our group project over the next couple of weeks is...

When I first got a copy of Nuance's Dragon dictation software, I really wanted to be able to define a single command to set up my computer to be ready to work.  Today, I have finally achieved it!   Telling my computer that it is "homework time" will open a terminal, a chrome webpage with Launch Academy's curriculum, and my Word document of notes - and it will assign them to portions of my screen using Divvy commands.   My current setup is an Automator Workflow triggered by a Dragon command, where the workflow is not only opening files but also using Apple script to trigger keywords.  Is it efficient? Not a bit.  Is it cool? Absolutely! This week I also got the opportunity to attend a Q&A panel of Rubyist Employers, which was really informative.  I met a few people in the field, and feel a little more confident about the job search post-bootcamp.  The most interesting question that was asked was how the employers were structuring thei...

Launch Academy has had a couple of assignments that use {props.children} in a Header component to render a page of other components below it.  What I discovered today (with full credit going to Jason Arnold's A quick intro to React's props.children  ) was that it can be used in other in instances, too. React components are usually represented by self-closing JSX tags.  What Jason Arnold helped me discover is that they don't have to be!  You can have a React component use a regular closing tag, and put other components/tags within them. const Wrapper = props => {     return (         <BabyComponent>             <h3>Welcome to the Baby Component!</h3>        </BabyComponent>     ) } Then, at any point in my BabyComponent's return/render I can put {props.children}.  Anything that I put between the BabyComponent's tags in Wrapper (in this case,...

I just learned this, and am really excited by it.  It is possible to add an event listener (JavaScript) to your entire document!  Okay, I might need to get out more, but I find this pretty darn exciting. Even better than that, though, is that you can include an event listener on the document that makes sure that all of your HTML has loaded before trying to run your JavaScript.  As an example: document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () =>{ //code to run only once the HTML has fully loaded })

My Launch Academy experience has been plagued with snowstorms!  We had 2 snow days in our first week, and in our second we're already slated for another crazy snowstorm hitting tonight.  It makes me wonder about the technology behind reporting storms.  There are so many weather apps to choose from, but I wonder where they're getting their data.  Wouldn't it be funny if everyone was using the same data, just presenting it in a slightly different way?  A huge part of whether your weather forecast will be accurate is whether or not your location services are accurate - and even if you have given the weather app your exact GPS positioning, if the nearest weather station that's taking measurements is blocks away, it won't matter at all. Before I started studying programming, I would get frustrated with apps and their lack of features or poor implementations of what looked like the same features that everyone else had.  I assumed that apps were doing their own ...

Going through the beginning of Launch Academy again is an amazing opportunity to work on all of the things that I hadn't mastered last time.  Not only am I able to complete challenges, but I can shift the focus of the challenge from mere completion into full comprehension, or use a challenge intended to improve one skill to also improve another. The first challenge Launch Academy issues to its students is to build a game of blackjack played through the command line (using Ruby.) I'm taking this second opportunity to write my code using Test-Driven Development, which is something that I had learned but never mastered to the level I wished.  If you'd like to see my Test-Driven Blackjack, it's up on Github:  https://github.com/msgalenwhite/Blackjack

Yesterday was my first day at Launch Academy (for the second time.) As we were going around and telling our stories of what brought us to Launch, I realized that I no longer think of myself as a "former chocolatier and pastry cook who is changing careers," and instead have become a "Junior Developer training and gaining knowledge before applying for her first role in tech."   While I was at culinary school, I often felt like a fraud because I didn't have the same depth of passion as those around me. I think that's because this is where I was meant to be. I still have a ways to go, and so much more to learn, but I am really, really excited about all of it!