Cant wait until Number 180 when you build a complete Web Framework ;-)
I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
171–180 of 370 posts
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely see your point, but from her description she spends 10 hours a day on this excersize. I could see that level of progress given those constraints, 10 hours a day every days for a month and a half is insane dedication. On the other hand that level of dedication seems to indicate that apparently she has some kind of OCD, no disrespect just wild speculation.
i'm not saying that this feat of creating 180 websites in 180 days is impossible. it's highly improbable and takes a very unique mix of dedication, intellect, funding, and, well, nothing better to do for half a year, but that's for someone with a background in coding. my beef is that this person is claiming to come from a completely non-programming background and has not read any books or taken any courses. i don't c…
well, nothing better to do for half a year
Yeah, this is the real fishy part. Sure, it seems like she has some previous programming experience, at minimum. Using "public" and "private" in javascript having no previous Java/C++/C# experience, or without having copied-and-pasted it from somewhere is odd. Big deal, though. She's promoting herself.
But why? If I had that kind of dedication, it wouldn't be on a tedious gimmick. It's much more sane to have one or two big ideas. She's fighting chicken-sized horses that's for sure.
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think your art background helped you develop the focus and dedication to work on projects for such long periods of time? Most programmers couldn't manage that.
Absolutely! When making art, you often go through a 'research' phase where you make a lot of sketches, models, mock-up, etc. Most of it is garbage but at the end you've prepared yourself to tackle the real thing. I sometimes think of this project as a really intense version of that process.
I second the interest in a blog post. Jennifer, it's rare that someone develops an art background before programming so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the similarities and differences.
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you look at the source? It's like 160 lines of code. Experienced programmer could do this in one hour, and I'm sure someone with 1.5 months of javascripting could do it in a day.
> It's like 160 lines of code. Which is precisely the reason why I am skeptical. I would find it more believable if she wrote 500 sloppy lines. Maybe I am a bad programmer but I often write elaborate code without much elegance and then go back and enjoy reducing the number of LOC without the code loosing expression which to me equals elegance (ie the code is still easily readable and understandable just with a lot le…
this is also a very good point. her code is polished and precise. any unused variables in there? missing semicolons? unintentional globals? nope. these are all things i would expect to see from someone just jumping into javascript, as well as at least 300 more lines of code for a program of this level of complexity, not just algorithmically, but in canvas manipulation as well.
either she is a motherfuckin genius or she is really good at finding puzzle pieces and putting them together. not to say she hasn't learned a great deal from the process, but i don't believe she's superhuman, either.
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#175I have to ask: How on earth do you find the time to do this? As much as I'd love to do this in order to get my hands dirty on web development and out of systems, I can't ever fathom having the free time available every day consecutively. I mean, for someone "learn(ing) to code" on Day 1 and by Day 15 doing "Dropping Boxes", it just seems a little far fetched. Obviously you have had a good portion of coding experience…
Another possible explanation is that she is intelligent and motivated and you are an asshole.
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#176Really great idea Jennifer! This is the kind of initiative and creativity that will surely land you multiple job opportunities. It reminds me of the steps which I took to transition into working on software professionally full time. I came to programming relatively late in life when I was 26 and found out that my wife was expecting a baby. The sudden change facing my wife and I made me take a hard look at my skill se…
Are you still based in Santa Cruz? I'm also starting up programming slightly later on while going to a community college (possibly the same one that you went to??), as I first started tinkering with some PHP around a year ago (my age now is 22), then tried a bit of RoR but they ended up being false starts.
I've in the last few months started back up with Python (primarily Flask) and JavaScript (mainly AngularJS), and deployed a couple toy web apps in the last month.
I don't know too many people in town, so I'm wondering is Santa Cruz still a viable place to get into the professional world? Might you have any specific advice for getting started here?
Thanks!
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#177There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bath…
> It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. I find this story very suspicious. Even theorists like to apply their work and prototype. It sounds more like they were scared into inaction…
"It sounds more like they were scared into inaction by the grade-weight, which is something I've seen in classes where one test determines the grade for the whole semester."
I would love some deeper insight into this, do you have any sources? Thanks.
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting how that is implemented. Didn't quite get from viewing page source. I mean, where is js?
at some point, she learned about minification and http requests and concatenated all her scripts into one "application" script.
It looks like the site is built with Ruby on Rails.
Rails has a feature called 'The Asset Pipeline'[1] which handles concatenation, minification, and compression
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#179This is awesome, Jennifer. Keep up the good work!
Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115
#180It looks like the majority of her Github commits are happening during 6pm-12am http://imagebin.org/265513