Middle of the month! February (the longest, coldest, worst month of the year) approaches.
There's a valentine's day game I wanted to publish but i've been so embroiled in looking for work that I have forced myself to set it to the side. It is like some sort of treat. Once I have employment worked out and I can stop panicking about it so much, I will be able to work on my wee gamemaker HTML5 game. In the meantime, my journey in learning a slew of (hopefully) hireable skills continues fruitlessly forward. I wish I could just put "I am SO GOOD at being an employee" on my resume and start from there. It's very true. I am, unfortunately, not able to half-ass anything, especially if I have a team depending on me, especially especially if the goals are clear. I think the open-endedness of the job market (plus the fact that the tech sector is bleeding out right now) is to my detriment... Perhaps I should go in to an office and say "what do you need done? I can absolutely do that, even if I have to learn it myself" because, unfortunately, I am very good at figuring things out.
Anyway.
Here's something fun. The hardest part of coding projects, for me, is integrating different codebases or systems together. My biggest hurdle with using jQuery was a simple one—I didn't know how to actually add it to a webpage until about a year ago. I had ammassed a bunch of knowledge about how to write in JS, how to use AJAX, and CSS/HTML were long-time friends of mine. But actually implementing it in a way that mattered eluded me. I couldn't figure out how to "plug in" the stuff I used. What was the point of learning syntax if I couldn't figure out how to apply it?
I felt similarly when I started learning python even further back. I thought "well, i can write python code, but how do i do anything outside of playing around in an IDE?" It took me a long time to figure out how to turn a python/processing sketch into something that could work with other codebases and make a proper application. I don't know why this type of integration has never been presented clearly enough to me. Perhaps, for everyone else, it's just a given.
Now, I understand a lot better. p5.js is a lot of fun, and playing around with how the library interacts visually with the HTML DOM has helped my understanding of webpage interaction by leaps and bounds. Finally, I don't dry heave in disgust at the mere idea of using an iFrame. (well, I still do, kind of)
Today I am working on a little data analysis project. I will find common surnames, and their lengths, and try to make a little graph of "Average Surname lengths by region". It will be hard, largely because I will need to choose appropriate websites for my sources. I will use python requests + BeautifulSoup (and other friends) to get the data, and then format it. I will also learn how to crawl websites, so if I accidentally DDOS someone (unlikely... I'm on a 4GB laptop), I'm sorry.
Wish me luck :)