VICTORY! Hacking Up a Mini-Win
From Academia Into the Real World
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BY JAMES KOTECKI •
@JamesKotecki •
7.5.13
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Filed Under: NEWS: Startups
Coding update!According to Codecademy, I am on a 17-day learning streak. That may sound impressive, but I still spent a solid ten minutes today completely flummoxed by a colon.
Turns out it needed to be a semicolon for the code to work. Come on, JavaScript, you knew what I meant! You're never going to become sentient at this rate.
Anyway, I am happy to report that this week I had a CODING VICTORY! Someone mentioned that on a website we were building, the title had to be an image file. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “I think we can actually make it text - a headline, in fact.”
I downloaded a free HTML editor (KompoZer, for you curious nerds), grabbed the old code, tried out some new code, and tentatively offered a solution. AND IT WORKED!
Yes, I had finally made something that worked in the real world; I felt like Doc Brown in Back to the Future when he first learns his future self invented a working time machine.
Shortly after my victory, a colleague pointed out that, while acceptable in practice, my HTML fix had been made outdated by the latest best practices.
And so once again, my acquisition of coding knowledge only underscores how little I know. But I'm becoming ok with that.
Overall, this whole process feels a lot like calculus used to. The way I struggle with a concept for a while, get frustrated and plough through by rote memory, go to bed, wake up the next day, struggle some more, and then finally grasp why something works intuitively - that's how math class used to feel for me. It's a type of mental workout I haven't had in a while, and it feels good.
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