This blog post will be slightly off the kilter of my usual writing. Not that I don't want it to be funny or engaging, but I'm not writing it with the same lighthearted intention that I've written about other, less-consequential topics like how to create tally marks or what I made my first website about. This post is also meant to be less results-oriented; there's no final product I want to show off or "behind the scenes" descriptor I'm writing. Instead, I want to use this entry as a jumping off point for discussing an issue that seems to be plaguing every aspect of society nowadays: the rise and dominance and social destruction as a result of: Facebook. But, in particular, I've been curious: what role has their software-baby, ReactJS, played in this power struggle? It's been a hard question to answer definitively. For one, news coverage seems very intently focused on "one side" or "the other": -It's very easy t...
Posts
A thought hit me a few weeks ago while I was commuting: surely there must already exist a computer font (or plugin? or...malware?) that can render Arabic numerals (ie: 1,2,3...) as tally marks (ie: / , // , /// ). A few search engine pages later, I was proven wrong. At first I felt frustrated and stymied. Sad and down. Depressed. Resentful. Well, not really. But I honestly didn't get it. Why wasn't there already a font that could take a number (say, 42) and render it as a series of slashes, grouped into fives with bundling-lines, and single slashes for the "remainder." As can be the case with a lot of problem solving, saying the question out loud helped me better understand the problem. Of course there was no font to do computational equations for me: all it's supposed to do is style a Unicode value ! But then, how was I supposed to display the tally marks I had in mind for my project (more on that in other posts)??!? If only I ...
To Start: Where to Start? For this post, I'd like to talk about the website that I put together for the final assignment in the FlatIron Pre-Work. There were some conceptual challenges for me going into it. For one, as a complete-novice programmer, my "eyes" were bigger than my "stomach," in terms of what I wanted to pull off with code (more on that later). There was also trying wrap my mind around being told I have a whole sandbox, and I have to use all of it: But, that wasn't actually the hardest part for me.Where I first got stuck is where I usually get stuck in creative thinking: where to start? Should I...gather a bunch of my favorite things and have them all...do something? What? Should I dedicate the space to be a public service announcement - with code? On What? Knowing Your Rights ? In the end, I decided I would indeed make the website around a theme. One of my favorite subjects, actually. Movies! The...