Slow Progress, Various Resources

I have been bogged down this week and making very little progress on my Udacity work, to be honest. I still found a few good resources.

Good resources I found this week:

Device Screenshot Emulator allows you take screenshots of how your site looks on various devices. This has been especially handy when I want to place images of projects I’ve worked on into my Udacity resume project. It is so accurate, the function on my site that I could always get to work in emulation in Chrome, but not actually work on my iPhone, fails to work in this emulator.

JSHint allows you to paste a chunk of code into the screen, and will make suggestions about things you may have missed or done in a non-standard way. This helped me a lot when I was getting an obscure error in Chrome due to some missing brackets.

Non JavaScript resources:

HTMLFreeTemplateStuff a Tumblr of interesting HTML and CSS templates.

Fantastic list of art tutorials by Jonathan Rector check out his art.

This isn’t even a resource, but I really have been helped by using HabitRPG to motivate myself. Losing virtual hit points by failing to complete tasks has been compelling! It also motivates me get at least 5k steps a day (yes I know 10k would be better), spend more time in prayer, work on my biceps, and any other thing I set for myself as a task. And I get to ride a pink dragon and have a pet zombie octopus.

 

Now I get to check “Write a Blog Post” off my task list!habitrpg

I don’t Understand JavaScript

So I finally hit a little “wall” in my Udacity course. Starting from my code background of “null”1, I don’t really understand JavaScript at the pace they are giving it to me in this course. So I thought “There must be a How to learn X the Hard Way  for JavaScript that I can check!” I was wrong.2

But I found something else that was very helpful! I found an article on tuts+ called The Best Way to Learn JavaScript.  And it recommended going through the JavaScript course at Codecademy. Oh! Why didn’t I think of that? I really enjoy Codecademy anyway. So now I’ve paused Udacity studies this week to get a refresher at Codecademy.

Further on the “list of things I should have realized but didn’t”, if you are working through a course at Codecademy and get stuck, you can’t continue, and they don’t give you a solution. In order to find a solution when I was stuck, I discovered people are broadcasting themselves going through the classes on YouTube! It’s a great way to watch someone else struggle with the same thing you are (and get a hint). Note, they may be doing it on Twitch.tv too, but I didn’t check.

Finally, I started reading Eloquent Javascript which is free to read online. I haven’t gotten too far, but I expect I will buy a copy just to support the author.

1 Well, “nil” but “null” is a JavaScript term, so it’s a weak pun, yay.
2And even if there was one, it may have been beyond me, to be fair.

I don’t understand Git and GitHub

I have sometimes wanted to throw the computer across the room when trying to figure out Git, but I found some good tutorials! I’ll put the links at the bottom of this post. Not only did I find helpful tutorials, but I want to put some of what I learned about the Git commands into “non technical terms”.

Git is used to help you organize backup copies of your program. Every time you commit a copy of what you are working on, it is like saving a copy of your document/project. Typically you do this every time you’ve added something or worked on something. All the previous saved versions of your project (or whole program directory, called a repository,) still exist, and you don’t  have to keep making incremental file names the way I usually do. And before you save your file, you can look at the differences you’ve made since the last time you saved. Status will check to see  which files are staged to be saved (commit).

I end up with a big directory full of confusingly-named copies like HorseFridayA.PSD, HorseFridayB.PSD, HorseFridayB2.PSD as I am working on an Adobe Photoshop file, for example. But with Git, your current save contains a log of all the changed versions you’ve made in the past! So if you need to go back and undo something, you have all those undo-states available.

Not only can you see a log of all the changes you’ve made, if you want to go back to a previous version and then “try something different and crazy that may not work” you can clone the project and make a branch. In the branch you can create a second version of your project. Then you can work on that version. And if you end up liking those features and wanting to add them back into the original version, you can merge them back together. Handy!

But another major reason people use Git is this: when you upload your project repository to GitHub other people on your team can make changes and work on the documents at the same time you are in them. Then you can update and merge them all back together. Git will warn you if you have made conflicting changes, and you can resolve them before you merge. And you can see the differences between what you did to your copy of the file, and the other team member did.

You can even use GitHub to fork and make a copy of another person’s code repository and alter it to do the things you’d like it to do. You can pull that copy down to your local computer, make changes and push it back.

So Git and GitHub are powerful and useful, once you know what they are for! I still don’t exactly understand why the command line is favored over a graphical interface, but it is, and “they” say you will find it great after you get used to it.

 Ok, now for the tutorial links. These are some I found especially clear and easy to follow:

Making the command prompt easier to use:

Meanwhile at Udacity (Week 2)

So Monday was my first “live” session with the Udacity teachers. First I attended a Google Hangout where they discussed some of the more advanced projects. It didn’t pertain to the project I am currently working on, but it was good to know that this would be available to re-watch when the content was more relevant. They have a great library of videos full of content like this; many other people have asked questions about the same projects I will be tackling. This is really useful stuff (if I remember, and take the time to use it).

After that was the “Coaches, Coffee, Code & More” live session. This one was not on Hangouts, it was on rabb.it and I had a lot of technical difficulties with it. In spite of that, it was a personal voice/video chat session with 3 students and 2 coaches. To me, these are the kind of interactions that are setting me up for success with Udacity. I felt like I had a rocky start because I kept applying to the wrong Google group (and consequently was not accepted). In addition, there were (and are) some other technical difficulties on the Udacity site, which have kept me from really feeling close to my “cohort” of students. But when you can spend live time with the teachers, it helps me realize they want to help you succeed.

I didn’t get to any of the “hard projects” yet. I’m really expecting a challenge, since even these first easy projects are out of my comfort zone! But right now I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Online Learning Tools (Part 2)

After I wrote that blog post on Online Learning Tools, I realized that I knew there was a site called Udacity that I had never tried. So, in the interest of being thorough, I went there to check it out. Let me tell you, I’m glad I did!

Udacity
Now I hesitated to try Udacity since I was already enjoying Udemy and I thought it would just be “more of the same.” They aren’t the same. Udacity has aspects of Udemy, sure; it has online classes at your own pace. But it has them arranged to form “Nanodegrees“: comprehensive sets of courses, developed by a key set of teachers working together. They aren’t random “this class looks interesting” buffets (which is how I am/was treating Udemy).

In Udemy there are sub-sets of classes within the classes, by “teaching group”. Say, you can group classes by “Infinite Skills” brand, and often they will go on sale that way “all Infinite Skills classes are 20% off with coupon AWESOMECOUPON“. But you could also find Infinite Skills classes at www.infiniteskills.com proper. Udacity, on the other hand, is very focused in what it offers, and who teaches it. I would say “which gives an overall more consistent learning style” but I haven’t actually enrolled in any courses yet. But I’m so convinced that Udacity is quality stuff, I’m about to enroll in the Front End Web Developer Nanodegree when enrollment begins. Wish me luck!

And Many More
Now there are so many more education options out there that I didn’t mention, like Skilledup and Coursera, edX, who knows how many others. I’m just going to add a link to LifeHack’s list of 25 Killer Sites for Free Online Education.