Fresh Code

I really try to be friends with CSS but CSS is not reciprocating. I’m sure it’s just my lack of understanding so I’ll have to mess with it some more but this is exactly how I feel about it –

 

Thanks to my mentor for sending me that!

He also showed me how to add content to the side bar so that I can also see that my stars are out of place in a completely different way than in live events. Yay!

Andrew was working downtown again since the demolition is still going on but none of his co-workers were going to be there so I suggested he come and work with me. He agreed and I promised not to bug him too much. Barbara also showed up! It was nice to see her and talk about how her project is going. I forgot that I’m on a different schedule and that she is done in about 2 weeks. I have five weeks. Maybe four. I dunno. Whatever it is it’s not long enough.

I continued worked on the JavaScript trying to get it to post properly but had the incorrect URL. Once I figured out how to format the correct URL I got a 403 Forbidden. Grrr! But this was Django so I remembered I had messed with a CSRF token issue before. Maybe this was the problem. I did a bit of poking around and also ran it by Peter who agreed that was the issue. We talked about a few ways to get/pass the token and I ended up just returning it as part of my JavaScript sync since I was already returning the event ID. That worked perfectly although Andrew had to help me with the code. So much for not bothering him!

My CSRF token issue was solved but now I kept getting an empty array whenever I would post. One thing after another! Andrew showed me how to use the developer tools to show me exactly what was happening (bothering him again). Firefox Developer Edition is super cool by the way. I spent quite some time being totally confused about what was going on because I just don’t really know JavaScript and jQuery that well. I fought with it for a while and decided to just go mess with my tests instead since they would need to be updated.

I ran my tests and yep they were failing. I needed to account for the CSRF token now so I added that in but everything was still failing. Hmmm…….Ah! It helps a lot to use a fresh test DB. Once I did that I still had failing tests but they made a LOT more sense and I was able to get them fixed right up. Whew!

It was time for lunch. Pizza from Sizzle Pie. Yum! Unfortunately Andrew was going to have to get his own food but I told him I’d walk to the food carts with him after I ate since he wasn’t ready to go anyway. I ate lunch with the Mozillians and then went to get Andrew. I guess Katt had offered he and Barbara pizza because there was plenty so that worked out.

Since my tests were passing and were not showing an empty array it was definitely something in my JavaScript/jQuery. I pretty much spent the remainder of the day trying all sorts of things to figure it out but I was stuck. 17:30 rolled around and it was time to go home.

Katt had given me the leftover vegan pizza and a yummy quinoa/apple salad so we scrounged for dinner.

Andrew sat with me after dinner and we looked at my code to see if he could figure out this empty array issue. Sure enough he tracked it down to a change in jQuery’s $.param() method since version 1.4. It seems the change was made to help out PHP, Ruby and Rails developers with the serialization of deep objects. Long story short, it was now returning my array with square brackets so I was getting []”31″ instead of [“31”]. Not so handy. My temporary fix until I talk to Peter is to get ‘ids[]’ instead of ‘ids’ from my view and change that in my tests as well. I can also manually convert to and from JSON but I’ll see what he thinks is best.

After Andrew figured that out I went over the JavaScript functions and explained what everything was doing to him so that he could correct me when I was wrong or explain things I didn’t understand. I find this to be one of the most helpful things for me. I learn so much when I verbalize what the code is doing and get immediate feedback and correction. I feel like I understand JavaScript so much better than ever. This method of “story telling” just really cements things for me. Thanks Andrew!

Today I learned that Leonard Nimoy passed away. Sad day 🙁

I had a very productive day and a great meeting with Peter. We talked about the star placement and CSS issues. He helped a TON with the JavaScript so I was able to get the data to be stored in localStorage.

I worked on getting ‘recent events’ and the sidebar populated so I could get the star placed over the thumbnails. Apparently I had to archive some events in order for ‘recent events’ to populate but I could not figure out how to get events to show up in the sidebar. I’ll have to ask about that tomorrow. All in all I got lots done.

Andrew was working downtown as usual but we both planned to stay all day since Wayne was tearing out a bunch of the ceiling. Once it was close to 17:00 I headed down to his co-working space and he was just about finished. We had a nice ride/walk home in the very light sprinkles.

It was BSD Pizza night so we didn’t spend much time at home before heading back out. We met at Via Chicago Pizza. I was looking forward to a repeat of the yummy pizza I had there a while back. Unfortunately they were out of the tofu ricotta. I was bummed but we ordered another pizza and it was actually excellent! After we ate Andrew sat and talked to everyone while Wayne and I walked down to Back to Eden Bakery. I couldn’t pass it up since it was so close. We got a raspberry hazelnut mini cake and a maple pecan chocolate chip mini pie. The pie was the best. We stayed until after 22:00 just talking and talking but Wayne was exhausted from his labor intense day so we finally headed home. I went straight to bed!

Today I learned about the Promise object. Super cool!

 

It actually rained today although I completely missed it. I was hoping to get a lot done so I can get close to finishing the implementation of this feature and get to test writing. I’d like to actually complete this thing before my internship is over! I will but some days it sure doesn’t feel like it. I did get things sorted with the latest push and Richard got me a new star sprite that looks great so I do feel a bit accomplished today. I tried to mess with localForage but I think I am just making things more difficult than they are. Story of my coding life.

Katt was out sick so that made for lots of fun getting back in the office whenever I had to use the restroom but everyone was pretty nice about it. I’m a lowly intern so I am not allowed to have a badge. Oh well. I had wanted to go tour the Co-working place that Kronda just joined but she had a late start and I ended getting picked up early. It’s a good thing too because as I was getting in the car Andrew let me know that Natale had accidentally ingested peanuts and the Benadryl was nowhere to be found. We quickly bought some and rushed home! I thought it was too late but he hadn’t started throwing up yet so he took a couple of pills and we hoped for the best. He did throw up after about an hour but it was long enough that he got the meds in his system. He was sick for sure and covered in hives but this was the least bad I’ve ever seen him react. Whew!

Andrew got TLS set up on ownCloud so I messed with getting my apps to sync to it and will tackle localForage tomorrow.

Today I learned that crows will sometimes try to build relationships with humans that feed them.

I went with Jordan to PDX Code Guild. I was going to talk a bit about my journey and experiences while learning to code and also get some work done. I messaged Peter about my PR and he gave me enough comments to get me working on stuff and I was also distracted by the class I was sitting in. They were talking about databases and I couldn’t help but listen so it was slow going for me for sure.

I had some code that was written to work a couple of different ways so sent it all to Peter to let him decide which was best. He let me know so I pulled out the unnecessary code and broke everything. Gah! I scratched my head for a while about that and then realized it has to do with a template I am extending from. Ok, I see the problem but how the heck do I fix it? I can’t change that template but I’m not sure how to change the other either. I messed with it and messed with it but didn’t come to any definite conclusions. I also had to add a meta class to my models.py. We needed to make sure that event and star were never duplicated together so I had to use unique_together. I would have never thought about having to do this but thank goodness others know more than me and can teach me stuff.

It was dinner night so we made enchilada casserole. Jason was home sick so Alice came and hung out until dinner was ready and then took two plates home for them. Miri and baby Michael were in California so Dale came with Penny Loafer. John, Spencer, Taylor, Delaney, Lauren, Sean and the six of us made up the rest of the crowd.

After dinner I looked at my bug again and asked Andrew what he thought might be wrong. He was confuse as well until he noticed that I had something misnamed! Grrr! I hope I get to a point where I can stop making silly mistakes like this. Anyway, that got me back up and running so I was thankful one again for a point in the right direction.

Today I learned a bit more about CSS and how it prioritizes stuff. I am not sure if that’s the correct word though.

I spent most of the day jumping from one thing to another. It seemed like my day was full of distractions and interruptions. I read about localStorage and localForage since I’ll be needing to mess with localForage soon. I didn’t make any progress on my pull request since it was Monday and it seemed to be a busy day for just about everyone. Lunch was fantastic and a very welcome interruption though. We had dumplings from The Dump Truck. Soooooo good!

After lunch, Jordan came over to Mozilla and worked on some sort of picture album app. A couple of his classmates came down later and we talked a lot about learning to program, fears about finding an employer willing to give us a chance as newer developers, the awfulness of writing resumes and cover letters….I wish I could just stay at Mozilla! Not because it would be easier but because I love what they are about and I really enjoy the people I work with. It was really interesting to talk to these younger guys because they are all about the money. They were talking about how it’s really important to switch jobs every year or two in order to maximize income. I’m so not in the same place at all. I want to work somewhere that I love, learn a lot, do a kick-ass job, and just settle in. Job happiness is so much higher on the list for me than money.

When I got home I worked on the scarf I am making. I’m almost done! We had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and then I watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Andrew was busy setting up ownCloud so I can get rid of Dropbox so no Dr. Who tonight.

Today I learned that Wayne doesn’t like it when I send a news crew to the house without asking him first. Pesticide Free Overlook.

I worked a bit from home this morning and then went into the office later. Jordan’s class is starting later on Fridays so this might be my new schedule. I was still trying to figure out how the paginate portion of the code worked so I was switching back and forth between my view and one that was already implemented in another view.  Eventually I started to see how it worked and was able to figure out how mine might need to be. I did a lot of changing something and testing, changing something and testing and made slow progress as I went. It was definitely progress though and as always I’m learning a lot as I go.

I eventually got the page to display all of the starred events but it was supposed to only show ten events per page. Huh. I was also not able to navigate properly. I figured it must have something to do with my URLs file. Yup! I fixed that up but now I was only able to navigate to any page but back to the original. Whenever I’d try it would just redirect me to the Air Mozilla home page. I tried fixing my url but that didn’t help. I read the Django docs for a URL redirect but that didn’t clear anything up for me. I searched to see if anyone else had the same issue and didn’t find anything. Ah well it was already time to go home. I’d have to figure it out later.

When I got home I decided to work on putting my CSS and HTML where it was supposed to go and see if I could get the start to overlay the starred event thumbnails. That was actually a lot easier than I had expected! It was kinda cool to see it all just work. I still had to figure out how to connect all of that to my code but Peter would be helping me with that.

Jayde and Estelle were upstairs getting ready for a school dance. Jayde just doesn’t seem old enough for such things but she’s in 7th grade now. She asked me if she could wear a little makeup. Oh man, I’m not sure I’m ready for this! She looked adorable though and I couldn’t really tell she had makeup on.

I asked Andrew if he would look at my two issues when he was done working. I was passing the wrong variable into a list function so it was just taking all of the events and making multiple pages with all of them. Grrr, that was too easy. I get annoyed when I miss stuff like that. The second one I wouldn’t have probably figured out. I guess because it was a redirect, the first place I had it go, which was the home page, was cached so it made no difference at all that I was changing the URL. Nothing was going to work properly until the cache was cleared. Andrew said it only finally occurred to him because he had dealt with something similar earlier in the week. SO many things to learn.

We made homemade pizza for dinner. It was excellent! I’m not sure why we don’t have this more often since it’s really easy to make. I made some tofu ricotta and topped mine with that, sauce, butternut squash, red onion, sweet peppers and massaged kale. Yum, yum, yum!

We were watching the kids for Dave and Alena while they went to some dark beer festival of some sort with Mike and Merci. The kids had just been sick so they were kind of tired and blah and really just wanted to watch movies. Baby Anya just wanted to be held so we all just sat and stared at the tv. Even kids have those days I guess! But Dave, Alena, Mike and Merci had tons of fun so that was good.

Today I learned to try using a private browser window to test if something might be messed up due to a caching issue.

Wow, today our oldest daughter is 26! It’s so weird to have grown children. I can only imagine how my mom must feel. Lauren is unfortunately sick today so that kinda sucks. We are going to get her a bunch of doughnuts though so maybe that will cheer her up. Or make her feel more sick. Who knows?

 

I was feeling really great about my progress when I met with Peter in the afternoon. We went over moving some of the duplicated code into reusable macros and it was pretty much the same concept as doing an include but I think it functions differently. The structure is pretty much the same though so I understood what he wanted me to do. He had done one already so made a pull request against my branch and all I had to do was merge it in. But then we went over pagination and where the CSS should go and how it should be modified and HTML and wow I really need to stop fighting it and just learn more about these things. Anyway, I have a ton of things to do and my head is full of new information to process. It feels great!

I spent the remainder of my day fighting with CSS and finally Andrew said he was ready to head up to me. Dave was with him and the three of us were going to go to the Multnomah Whiskey Library. We’d never been but I had been wanting to take Andrew since we moved here. What a great place! Andrew was carded of course. I don’t think that will ever stop happening. Dave and Andrew each got some kind of whiskey and I told the server that I don’t really drink so he said he’d suggest a whiskey sour. I asked if it had cherries in it and he said it did and he would make sure it had extra. It did and he even brought me more on the side! They are the really expensive Luxardo cherries. Very sweet! My drink was pretty good but I couldn’t finish it. I felt the alcohol after just a few sips and I wanted to make sure I could get myself home and also not throw up. We had a really nice time. The guys said their drinks were excellent. It’s definitely a place we need to take Wayne.

We made our way to the Max and it was a beautiful night out. The food carts were so busy and people were everywhere. Our train came right away this time so we quickly said goodbye to Dave and headed home. On our walk to our house we noticed that it had apparently rained quite a bit very recently but the sky was nearly devoid of clouds by the time we got there. So strange. The house smelled great when we walked in. Wayne was making a huge pot of vegetable barley soup, Jayde had baked a cake and there was also a box of doughnuts.

Natale and I started a game of chess and the rest of the family played Star Trek Uno until dinner was ready. It was delicious! Lauren chose an apple fritter for her birthday dessert so Jayde stuck a candle in it and we sang happy birthday. She still wasn’t feeling great so took her fritter and went to bed. I hope she’s better tomorrow.

Today I learned that the American Alligator uses the heat generated by composting in order to incubate their eggs. Eggs hatched at 30C or lower will all become female and those at 34C or higher will all become male. Eggs in between these temps will be a mixture of both. Also, alligators are one of my least favorite animals. They creep me out but I didn’t learn that today.

Wow, I had been feeling so stuck early last week and the week before. Everything felt impossible but getting small pointers here and there has really helped me move forward, learn and gain some confidence. I keep letting myself feel like whatever thing I am struggling with is going to finally be that thing I can’t ever understand but it’s just not true. I can learn anything I want to if I try hard enough. It’s just hard to remember that in the middle of confusion.

Today I got placeholder_img and thumbnails working! I also tweaked my bulk event creation script to add those features. I got my script for starring events to run and print out the starred event count. I have my sprite toggling from starred to un-starred. Now I just have to figure out how to get the thing to hover over the thumbnail. I think I’ll have it placed below the actual video but it’s all stuff we need to talk about.

Wayne picked me up and we went to Trader Joe’s to get stuff for dinner. We decided to have green curry over rice. It would be simple and fast! When we got home I helped get everything prepared. When Alice came over, Wayne headed for the shower and she and I finished cooking. Tonight we had the six of us, Alice, Jason, Spencer, John, Miri, Dale, Baby Michael (who was wide awake and so much fun!), Lauren, Sean, Roberto, Frankie, Taylor and Delaney. Everyone loved dinner so we will keep that one in the rotation for sure.

Today I learned how NOT to send a command to my tmux session. I crashed the whole thing while trying to figure out how to save sessions. The point is to recover them in the event of a crash. So much for that! I’m gonna tackle it tomorrow though hopefully.