!date
Warning and TL;DR : I pump my own tires in this post. But mostly complain and justify my shortcomings which I eventually reframe as strengths and round out with the actual explanation of what I've been doing for these three days.
from IPython.display import HTML
HTML('<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LptTKfrHSi4" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>')
This is the kind of stuff I listen to while writing and writing code.
Also look how I just taught you to embed youtube videos in your Jupyter Notebooks.
I'm the greatest of all time.
Anyway. The hiatus was caused because I didn't feel like posting yesterday and the day before. Sometimes I don't know what to write and I would rather bore you with a long AF blog post about what happened in three days rather than one.
Day 13 started off just like any other day. It was a Wednesday I think.
I had spent the night/early morning/(read: past midnight) getting late posts from the weekend up and finally catching up, realizing I hadn't linked certain things on my website and what have you. I woke up late. Worked for awhile and then proceeded to be brain dead for the things in my life that I deem important like coding or just being productive in general.
I'm also in the middle of what mere mortals might call an existensial crisis or imposter syndrome but I don't want to call it that. Those things don't sound cool and I want to be cool. So I'm going to give it a name. An awesome name.
Here it comes.
Here comes the awesome name.
Was that as cool as you hoped? I literally came up with that on the spot.
What does it mean? Technically nothing. I don't think it's a word but I built it so now it's a word.
Ambiguation is doubtfulness or the uncertainty of meaning. -nality just makes it into a fancy thing that one can have, like an adjective.
What's not clear? I've been working on "learning how to program" for four or five years now and I don't have a job in it. Meanwhile, in my curated "dev" community on Twitter I watch people decide to change careers and a few months later they're full fledged web developers.
Why could this be? Probably because my resume stinks. Or this website is unfinished. Or because I don't apply to programming jobs. It might mostly be because of the last reason.
Dev jobs be like:
- this is an internship, you will not be paid
- must have +10 years of experience developing and scaling enterprise python applications in Java
- has had experience with AWS, DLSA, DOAFN, KIKME, FIQN, OAFN, ODL, NV^6, UAFS,
- must have top-secret security clearence
- must have CS degree, or Math phD
Then the community is like:
Hey don't be deterred by job applications like this (the above), just apply.
Uh...
But it is also kind of my fault for framing those few individual's successes as "Everyone is getting a job within months."
Since starting to learn Python, I have only stuck with Python. I haven't really ventured out into the world to mess with other things like JavaScript or PHP <- Things that make you much more employable faster NOT because they are easier to learn but beacuse most websites use these technologies.
Also. I talked about this other thing the other day - I follow a bunch of tutorials. I do this because since I don't have a programming job I obviously need to learn more to get a job right? So I should do a tutorial, tutorials are for people who need to learn something.
Then, in said tutorial, I run into a problem. Maybe it seems like a simple problem but I can't figure it out.
Well that's it then, I don't know how to program if I can't even get the thing in this tutorial to work.
Then twenty levels of tangents later I'm down the Alice-of-Wonderland of rabbit hole tutorials trying to learn how to learn with Python by building something in Brainfuck.
Wait...what?
Here's what's clear. When a hiring manager finally finds this post they'll discover that I have a serious problem focusing, so much so that it actually looks like I have an inherent burning desire to continually learn and better myself (look at that tasty resume line. NOM NOM NOM).
Ugh. Look. If you don't get any farther in this post just know that if you decide to learn how to program, know that you could have done anything else with your time and probably have become an "expert" at it but it won't be as cool as this (unless it's like, going back to school to major in rocket science or astrobiocybernetics). And to just start out with JavaScript if you decided to learn how to program to get a job in the first place.
Wow. You probably just realized that that was all day 13. If you're still here I'm actually impressed. Let's go deeper.
Well not quite yet. At the end of day 13, I finally made it to the "final mission" of a chapter on Dataquest and it's like a miniature data analysis project. Exciting right??? Not really, I got discouraged because I didn't understand the problem the first read through and it was like, 3 am. That made me realize that I probably do all this coding and writing too late at night to really dig into it properly.
Yesterday I showed up at this new library I found. Well it's not new but it's new to me and therefore it's new. I think I talked about it in another post.
I showed up to the library with a serious intention to crush some work I had that day and dive straight into some programming.
Well ... that didn't happen. I ran into a work issue that took way too long to figure out because of (cringy apparent unpopular opinions that I hold about how businesses should work but we won't go there) stuff. And then after getting done stressing about that and finally getting to work I kind of ran out of time and had to go climb before an appointment.
I see a therapist.
If you didn't realize that until now then you're the seriously delusional one.
It's okay to be delusional though. It's nice here.
So all day I was thinking about what I wanted to work on because I didn't really get to it until last night where the clock was ticking, day 14 was technically over so I opened up my Data Visualization with JavaScript book (you read that right, I wrote 'JavaScript' (also classic idioms like, instead of saying "you read that right, I wrote" instead of saying "you read that right, I said" don't really make sense to me here because it's not something I'm really saying, it's something that I'm actually writing (well wrote, past tense) so that's why I word things things the way I do and ruin classic idioms))(If you're still successfully keeping track you should know there's still a missing parenthesis from umpteen posts ago. Good for you, you're such an astute stalker) and I started working my way through it.
I WROTE SOME DAMN JAVASCRIPT. Whew. Man that feels good to say. I'm so with it in culture and stuff. You can check it out here and the repository overflowing with code is here
Why am I doing this book? Because I don't really feel like doing fancy javascript things. It seems popular and I'm anti popular things because I think it's still cool to be a hipster. HOWEVER I do acknowledge how useful Javascript is and it's a skill I need if I ever seriously want to have a paycheck from a company that whose actual intention is to pay me for programming.
I'm actually really excited about it.
which is today.
I haven't actually coded today yet but I will because I have to
1) upload this post which takes some html finessing (read: copy pasting) 2) add the link for my awesome javascript tutorial...ness 3) do more javascript because I know I'm already uncertain if I personally count the above as "actual coding".
There's that.
Thanks for wasting your time here in this corner of the internet.
Have a great weekend.