Author / DarkWave

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Posts by DarkWave

Making music, writing, photography, striving for fitness. There's so much to do in this life and so little time. So much to do. So little time.
by DarkWave

Udacity React Nanodegree: Project Three

Look to this day, graduate. The third and final project was building a mobile flashcard app using React Native. This is not a technical blog entry, by the way. It’s very high level and mainly serves to finish out the blog trilogy. You can pretend it doesn’t exist like I do with the final Matrix movie.

https://github.com/mcstrings/mobile-flashcards

Here’s a pedagogical tidbit I picked up. The most helpful thing I heard/read throughout this online course was when someone said something to the effect of, “It’s not that hard. With a little effort you’ll get it. There are a lot of new concepts, and it may be confusing at first but it’s not difficult.”

Somehow, that put my brain in a very receptive, open mode. It put things into perspective, because it felt difficult at the time. But when I told my brain, “You know, Brain, you’re a lot bigger than state management and asynchronous side effects. It’s all going to click at any minute. It’s just a matter of time. Here. Have some caffeine.”

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by DarkWave

Udacity React Nanodegree: Project Two

The code is here. When I figure out how to serve it, I will. UPDATE: GitHub Pages!

I just submitted project two, the “Would You Rather” app.

This link to the deployed app almost works: https://mcstrings.github.io/would-you-rather/

Note: The first page you’ll see is a 404 error. Just click on one of the links to get things started. GitHub Pages doesn’t play well with React’s router, apparently, and at the moment I’ve got thangs to do other than putz around with it.

Code is here: https://github.com/mcstrings/would-you-rather

  • Login using Adorable Avatars
  • Leaderboard
  • Responsive layout
  • Using React Bootstrap 4

But first … Design

I’m not going to pretend that I planned this out well. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Having a global “single source of truth” state is different. When async calls attack.

I decided to use Bootstrap 4, which lead to React-Bootstrap. I chose it because, at the time, I had an upcoming interview and I needed to reacquaint myself with Bootstrap and newly acquaint myself with Bootstrap 4. All of the UI frameworks each have their own flavor, the same way sandwich shops each have their own aroma when you walk in the door.

They’re definitely useful and can make laying out the UI responsively so much easier, even if it requires a lot of googling. Note: React-Bootstrap now supports Bootstrap 4, but I can save you some time by directing you to their migration page.

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by DarkWave

How losing my job helped me level up

TLDR
If you want to be a good, cutting edge developer, code has to be one of your hobbies. Somehow, some way.

In addition to your day gig, you’ll find yourself reading, experimenting, sandboxing, building a project, going to meetups, and attending conferences. If you’re on the next-level tip, you’ll be contributing to open source code, technical blogging, teaching, or giving talks at meetups and conferences. 

I’m not saying that we have to do and know everything all the time, even though some people manage to, somehow. But if we want to keep up we have to do some of it regularly.

The only way to learn code is to write code, ultimately. Like learning a spoken language, it’s not something you can get from reading or watching tutorials. The physical act of typing, problem solving, struggling, researching, and building muscle memory for those repetitive bootstrappy chunks are the processes that ingrain a new language in the skillsets section of your mind. We’ve got to build those new neuron pathways every way we can.

Sometimes you just need to know enough to understand the high-level concepts, the pros and cons, and the state of the ecosystem.

But there have been a few times where I’ve watched tutorials for hours, understood everything, and then sat down with my laptop, fired up the IDE, and couldn’t for the life of me bang out snippets and examples, e.g. “Hello, World”, without googling or reading documentation.

Acceptance

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by DarkWave

World Usability Day: Design for Good or Evil

I attended the World Usability Day Unconference facilitated by UXPA DC today at ByteCubed in Crystal City.

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You could show up and volunteer to give a talk. Man, I really have been out of touch with the design community. It’s been a long time. I’ve been to UI events before, but I’ve never been to one focused on design ethics. It’s a perennial topic.

There were unconference talks, a networking break, and then a workshop facilitated by Kat Zhou.

THE KILLER APP. LITERALLY?

I shared the following with the group. Here’s the TLDR. I don’t want to kill anyone, directly or indirectly. I want to build cool, beautiful products and tools that help people make, manage, learn and build, and that leaves them feeling satisfied and accomplished when they’re done.

When I first joined a defense contractor — a small startup that was ultimately swallowed up — I was fascinated by the challenges. Interesting problems and a lot of low hanging fruit, and also mind numbing complexity. Our product was like Google Earth for the military. It was like a video game in a lot of ways. You track assets, points of interest, human intel, events, etc. Brilliant stuff.

As the product evolved, needs evolved. Data analysis was growing in importance, relatively, over awareness and planning. Who knows whom? Are there predictable patterns? Is there a correlation between people and events?

I love maps. I love the stories that data can tell.

Then it got real.

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by DarkWave

RVA JS

I began writing this yesterday at RVA JS.

Today I’m at RVA JS 2018, Richmond’s second annual JavaScript developer’s conference.

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I haven’t been to a conference in ages. I’ve always wanted to attend conferences for UI/UX Design and Front End Web Development, come back to the workplace with useful knowledge, and have constructive impact. Somehow, for budgetary reasons usually, I routinely missed the travel/conference/education boat.

Out of a sense of nostalgia, I googled the possibilities and was excited to see that there are options within striking distance. Since I have plenty of time on my hands these days, in theory, I figured it would be a wise investment of time and energy to check out some of the Mid-Atlantic’s tech conferences.

Since I’ve been all over YouTube and the internet reading and scouring articles, trying to nail down some sense of direction and interest in this new dev world, it’s interesting to see the difference between local, national, and international thoughts and trends. Are there a few gurus unintentionally dictating our developer lives through proclamations? Is the web dev community skeptically but too willingly influenced by the cult of personality?

Never a dull moment, but always forward.

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