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What I've been up to lately
Jul. 14th, 2015 05:09 pmI've been through the first few chapters of the Aquent Gymnasium Javascript Foundations course, but that's momentarily on hold due to the Grim Flash Bugs of Hacking Team... Before that, I had some fun learning how to screw around with developer tools: F12 toggles the modern update of "view source", where you can look if webpages you visit have scripts that log things to the console, look at the scripts and how they're written, interesting stuff like that.
Around the 4th I had the idea that it would be fun to make a program that would show you the layout of the stars on the American flag (the star area is called the "union", apparently) once we added Puerto Rico as a state... And for any number of states, really. My thought was to use the brute-force ability of programs, find every rectangle that contains the right number of stars (like, for 9: 1x9, 4+5, 3x3, 5+4, 9x1) and then compare their proportions to the proportions of the union, and I got all the sub bits working. However, I've gotten hung up on the math, and looping, that breaks the number of stars into possible rectangles. I need something that will return an array of every grouping that adds to the correct number of stars, where the groupings are an even number of rows of length "X" plus any number of rows of length "X-1". (The flag has, in the past, looked like an I-beam).
A friend of mine at Amazon pointed out this online thing for learning to code Javascript, Free Code Camp. The idea is that once you know just enough to be useful, you start being of use by coding actual projects for nonprofits that sign up with them; and then you have a portfolio of work to use to get a job. Sounds pretty great, though today I hit the JQuery section and it popped me over to Codecademy... I did that last year, when it was Code Year ("Learn to code in a year!"), and it's not my style. It takes minutes of cutting and pasting at their direction to be able to shake out a bit of actual information, and they rarely explain the reasons behind anything. I vastly prefer just reading everything at once and having more freedom to build a thing...
But I know much more about CSS, now, so woo!
Around the 4th I had the idea that it would be fun to make a program that would show you the layout of the stars on the American flag (the star area is called the "union", apparently) once we added Puerto Rico as a state... And for any number of states, really. My thought was to use the brute-force ability of programs, find every rectangle that contains the right number of stars (like, for 9: 1x9, 4+5, 3x3, 5+4, 9x1) and then compare their proportions to the proportions of the union, and I got all the sub bits working. However, I've gotten hung up on the math, and looping, that breaks the number of stars into possible rectangles. I need something that will return an array of every grouping that adds to the correct number of stars, where the groupings are an even number of rows of length "X" plus any number of rows of length "X-1". (The flag has, in the past, looked like an I-beam).
A friend of mine at Amazon pointed out this online thing for learning to code Javascript, Free Code Camp. The idea is that once you know just enough to be useful, you start being of use by coding actual projects for nonprofits that sign up with them; and then you have a portfolio of work to use to get a job. Sounds pretty great, though today I hit the JQuery section and it popped me over to Codecademy... I did that last year, when it was Code Year ("Learn to code in a year!"), and it's not my style. It takes minutes of cutting and pasting at their direction to be able to shake out a bit of actual information, and they rarely explain the reasons behind anything. I vastly prefer just reading everything at once and having more freedom to build a thing...
But I know much more about CSS, now, so woo!