A few weeks ago, I had a moment of pretty serious Imposter Syndrome. A coding meetup group, called Rust-NYC , decided to host its meeting at the Flatiron School, where I spend my days taking classes. A coding meetup logically seemed like the a great place to meet likeminded folks. It was only after the meeting had started, and I started chatting with people, that I realized how far in, over my head, I had gotten. It turns out: 1) Rust isn't just a clever name for the group (in its reference to the short lived nature of hardware/in that the group also never sleeps ), it's also the name of the language they all practice, and meet to discuss. 2) Rust has fewer formal applications in the market place - which means the folks there are also devoting their hard earned free time (and free brain space) to more coding and programming and syntax and refactoring and debugging and and and... The imposter syndrome set in when I realized that this kind of meetup (despite its delicious
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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
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 knew a programmer...
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! There were a few reasons for this.