Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Here We Go Again

I'd like to say I'm like Madonna, and I can keep making comebacks. That would require that I hit it big in the first place. Eh, imperfect world, imperfect metaphors.

I'm back in the saddle, applying to the Ada Developers Academy. I'm a little stuck on creating a video (I'm of the older generation that created presentations on poster boards, so I'm a little out of my comfort zone.)  I need to reach way back to my drama days and come up with something awesome. I happily (but only briefly) distracted myself with submitting a pull request to fix a typo on the website. I'm not sure if that's the best way to draw attention to my application, but I would never have been bold enough to do that in the past. And my old ways of thinking and doing haven't gotten me where I want to be, so it's time to try another way.

Enough blogging in an attempt to avoid real work. Wish me luck!!

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Next!

One year and four months ago, I started the Code Year course on Codecademy.  A few rage-quits and many diversions (wow, Ruby's cool) later, I'm nearly done with the course (plus several other courses on the site.)  So what's next?

The next big item on my agenda is Microsoft's Windows Azure Developer Challenge.  I'm part-way through step 1 and will co-post my progress here.  Finishing two more Udacity courses are also bubbling up through my backlog.

Finally, remember how I said Ruby's cool?  Wow.  I'm giving myself a crash course in Ruby (and then Rails) and then I'm applying for the Rails Summer of Code project.  And training in Mozilla's #teachtheweb project.

I think I've got a few projects to keep me from getting too bored.  Idle hands, after all...  ;)

-- edited to fix bad link, 4/30/13 7:30am PDT

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Open Source is Hard. Let's Go Blogging!

Wow!  I've just burned through the better part of my coding time this week trying to figure out just how to jump in and (attempt to) contribute to the Wonderful World of Open Source.

I feel defeated.

I've found lots of awesome projects (this was a great starting point and I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface). But after sifting through the pages and pages on Bugzilla, et al, (and even successfully reproducing one bug) I'm still lost as to what to do next.

I'm taking a little solace in the wonderful Scott Hanselman's post on being a phony.  I trust that after all of his experience, he knows what he's talking about and that it's these moments of being in over your head that result in growth.

Back on the horse I go... wish me luck!

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Quick Catch Up

There's so much going on and I've been neglecting this poor blog.

I passed my exam (woo-hoo!) so now I get all kinds of email recommending the next five exams I should take.  I'm working on a mini-paint program but it's not quite ready for prime time yet, so for now it's a learning project.  I'm also working through my huge Pocket queue.  More will come soon....

P.S. As long as I'm on here, here's the code I'm working on.  It's really rough but it's a start.


<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>Mom's Mini Paint Game</title>
<style>
body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}
aside {
position: relative;
float: right;
margin-right: 25px;
padding: 0px;
}
canvas {
border: 1px solid black;
}

#palette > div {
width: 30px;
height: 30px;
/*display: inline-block;*/
}

#red { background-color: red; }
#orange { background-color: orange; }
#yellow { background-color: yellow; }
#green { background-color: green; }
#blue { background-color: blue; }
#violet { background-color: Violet; }
#indigo{ background-color: Indigo; }
#erase { background-color: inherit; }

</style>
</head>
<body>

<canvas id="myCanvas" width="1000px" height="690px">
</canvas>
<aside>
<p>Press F5 or click refresh to start over<p>
<p>Your mouse is at: <span id="status"></span></p>
<div id="palette">
<div id="red"></div>
<div id="orange"></div>
<div id="yellow"></div>
<div id="green"></div>
<div id="blue"></div>
<div id="violet"></div>
<div id="indigo"></div>
<div id="erase" class="erase">ERASE</div>
</div>

</aside>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function(e){
    var clicked = false;
    var $document = $(document);


    $document.mousemove(function(e){
      $('#status').html(e.pageX +', '+ e.pageY);

var canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');
var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

var colorChoice = "";

var eraseFlag = false;

//select a color
$('#palette > div').on("click", function() {
var $this = $(this);
colorChoice = $this.css("background-color");
if ($this.hasClass('erase')) {
eraseFlag = true;
colorChoice = '#FFFFFF'; //erase hack
}
});

//console.log(canvas);
    canvas.addEventListener('mousedown', function(event){
    clicked = true;
    context.beginPath();
    context.moveTo(event.pageX, event.pageY);
    }, false);
    canvas.addEventListener('mousemove', function(event){
    if (clicked === true){
    context.strokeStyle = colorChoice;
    if (eraseFlag) {
    context.lineWidth = 10;
    }
    context.lineTo(event.pageX, event.pageY);
    context.stroke();
    }
    }, false);
    canvas.addEventListener('mouseup', function(){
    clicked = false;
    }, false);
});
    });

</script>
</body>
</html>

Monday, January 28, 2013

Starting Fresh at P2PU's School of Webcraft

Jaime Lyn Schatz

Starting Fresh at the School of Webcraft

I'm starting fresh with the P2PU School of Webcraft linked over at Mozilla. One of the first challenges is to blog your progress, so here I am.

I'm not giving up completely on Codecademy and I've already signed up for the Parallel Computing course over on Udacity. I need to try something to hone my HTML5 that's a little less frustrating than Codecademy and it's many frustrations.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

"YES!"

Nothing else beats that feeling of finally, finally, finally getting something to work. (Especially when it's something relatively simple but completely new to you!) I'll have something post-able soon (hopefully some time tomorrow.)

As a side note, it was great fun letting the littlest one type away in a string in the source file to show her how everything you do in the editor can have a big impact on the screen. Now she can brag that she's been coding since she was six!