Progress: Moving the needle, sometimes by millimeters, other times by centimeters

Let's talk about progress. The inspiration came from revisiting my first blog post and realizing I needed to update my learning-to-code timeline. Also, I watched this video yesterday:

Maybe it was the "this-is-moving-and-important" music in the background or the earnest tone that made me pay attention. But really, it was just something I needed to hear from an objective source: "Be insatiable...just move the needle in even the smallest way, every day...you are gonna look back and see mountains of movement behind you."Thank you, DevTips!

So let's talk about my progress. Since my first post, I have gotten through a lot more of the Flatiron prework. I have completed the Ruby Codecademy track and the Treehouse Ruby Foundations. I'm still reading Chris Pine's "Learn to Program"....while I learn about Rails. Oh, and I also had an interview for the Flatiron School! I'd ask you to wish me luck, but I'm not going to leave it up to luck. Instead, I'm going to get more insatiable and keep pushing the progress needle. But you can still wish me luck if you want to. I'm not one to turn down a kind word. :-)

Back to progress since the first post. I've been blogging! To you, my blog reader (thanks!), this is obvious, but it is important progress to note. In the first post, I said this would be a technical blog...and it will be. But I'm still learning how to write technically (by reading about it), so stay tuned for more technical content. It's coming, I promise. The needle WILL advance further....hey, look at the next paragraph!!

On top of these things, I have been taking a Girl Develop It Intro to Javascript and jQuery class. Last night was the 3rd of 4 classes. We started class talking about how to interact with the DOM and using the getElementById and get/setAttribute methods. Then we got to the intro to jQuery part and learned the jQuery way to do that. Last night's in-class exercises had us using event handlers and we left off with homework to use JS and jQuery to make a form. Once I submit this blog, I'll be revisiting all of last night's exercises to get some more clarity and depth about these things.

Oh, and one last note on my progress. I edited my first blog post today after I noticed that part of the text had a background-color of white. Not sure how/when that happened - how did I not see it when it was originally published?! I confess I was just using Blogger's WYSIWYG interface with a little bit of html tweaking originally. But I have atoned. First, I checked the HTML for the first post. So many span tags!! The same weird span tags repeated multiple times in one element. Why so many span tags, WYSIWYG, why?!? So I got all of those out of there and fixed some other things and THEN I wrote this post not only directly as HTML, but even in a text editor. Much better!

I'm off to do some event handling. Who knows? Maybe one day all these millimeters and centimeters of progress will add up to many meters, many kilometers of progress!! For the next post, I'll talk about my experience as a newbie going to tech meetups (mostly QueensJS, NYCHTML5, and NYC on Rails) and how that is advancing my progress. In the comments, tell me about progress you've made recently and what keeps you insatiable for more.

There's a first time for...

...editing and problem-solving within someone else's code. My first time with this was a few days ago!

On a quick visit to my brother and his family, my sister-in-law - I'll call her the client here - asked, "Hey, are you pretty good with HTML?" (Spoiler alert: HTML wasn't really the issue, but yes, yes, I am.)

She needed help with her job's website, which was built and maintained through CMS Made Simple. There was some content she needed to update, and when she tried it herself, she got an error and wasn't sure how to fix it. So that morning, while I wasn't playing with my niece, I was working out this puzzle.

The puzzle

Client's request: Add 1 line of content to 3 different pages of a website

Error: After adding content and trying to submit the changes (which did not include changes to the Name field of this file), an error comes up saying that the Name field is not in the correct format.

So, this seemed like a pretty simple problem. The requirements for the Name field were that they not have spaces or invalid characters; the files, as they had been operating, were named something like "Contact Landing - A," "Contact Landing - B," and "Contact Landing - C." I changed the names* to be in the correct format like so: "ContactLandingA." So that should work, right?

But then, upon saving the changes and refreshing the page, the section within the file disappeared all together. After spending some time trying different things, I decided to take a break and come back to it. And that's when it came to me - of course, since I changed the name of the file, I needed to update the file name wherever it was being referenced.

The next puzzle was to find where it was being referenced. The file I changed was nested within a global content section, and after some investigation, I discovered that it was referenced within a file in the templates directory. The format for referencing the file was one I hadn't seen before and didn't fully understand. I'm not even completely sure what language it was in - maybe PHP? There were curly braces, an "=" and a "$" and some files names, all arranged in a way I didn't quite understand. But I tried some things out, replacing a file name where I thought it made sense - and it worked!!

*Actually, I only changed the name of file A, but left file B as it was so that I would have a comparison - as far as I could tell, there was no version control system here, and I didn't want to break anything. I'm glad I did this - it was helpful as I went along to compare what the code was like before the change, and what the code with the error was. 

The prize

My reward for figuring all this out was, of course, my sister-in-law's thanks, but the best part was how accomplished I felt once I had solved the puzzle!! I have been learning to code for about 3 months now and I'm getting the hang of doing the codecademy.com tutorials, and I've been a little worried about what it would be like to stare down pages of someone- (or ones) else's code and figure out what was going on. With this small, but still sweet, success, I am more confident about jumping into mysterious code. 

Thanks for reading! Tell me about your first experiences working with someone else's code in the comments!

#=> "Social workers CAN code!!"

The story of how a social worker starts programming

At the start of Summer 2014, I decided to build my professional skillset and learn some programming. My partner of 9 years has been a programmer for about 5 of those, and so many people in our social circle also happen to be programmers. Currently, I’m at a professional crossroads, and I am choosing programming as the path that will allow me to simultaneously be creative in my work, connect with other creative and passionate people, and make positive contributions to the people and organizations I encounter - and maybe even the whole world! That said, social work is more than a job I had for several years - it is part of my identity and I think I will be able to apply some of my favorite things about social work to programming. Social work is about using a systems approach to support the person (or group or community, etc.) in front of you in achieving the goals they have set out for themselves. From being a "sponge" listener (before starting to program myself) in many dinner conversations with my partner and our friends, I already knew systems theory applies to computer programming. Of course - websites, web applications, databases, etc. - are all systems. Existing within and interacting with other systems. I love it already!
So I will be using this blog to document my learning, and from time to time I'll reflect on how my new learning as a programmer is fitting in (or not) with what I know as a social worker. After this first post, the blog will be mostly technical, with an appropriate amount of narrative reflection (I'm still a social worker!!).

A timeline of my coding journey so far:

• Summer 2014: I found codecademy.com after being blessed in disguise (the grant that was funding my nonprofit social worky job ended). I began working on the HTML and CSS, and I was way more excited this time around. But when I decided to mix it up and learn some JavaScript in the middle of the HTML and CSS tutorials, I started to see how fun coding could be!
• August 2014: Liking programming more and more, going to some meetups (queens_JS, NYC HTML5, NYC on Rails), and greeting my partner when he came home from work by saying, "Hi! How's your day? I have [x] [y] [z] questions about what I learned today." I already knew he was a great partner, and now I found out he was also a very patient, informative, and attentive tutor, as well!
• End of August - early September 2014: Applied to Flatiron School!!!
• September 2014: Wait in agony. Do the Flatiron prework. Mind blown by the command line - this has taken a lot of practice to get used to. Pretty confused by git, but I think it's coming together.

...and at this point, I'm diving into Ruby. I've been getting into the control-flow, practicing loops and iterators, and building hashes. And that brings us to THIS VERY MOMENT (literally, I'm switching windows between blog-writing and Ruby codecademy-ing).

I've just been introduced to one-line if and unless statements, and am now meeting ternary conditional statements. It is helpful how codecademy builds up by spelling things out with longer, wordier versions of code, and then says, "hey, by the way, there's actually a simpler way to do this."

I am off to keep learning Ruby, but I leave you with this, the very first ternary conditional statement that I just wrote:

soc_wrkrs_can_code = true
puts soc_wrkrs_can_code ? "Social workers CAN code!!": "You need to check your boolean. "