Sometimes in this job (read: this activity that I do in my free time and when I'm not doing it, stress that I'm not doing it), I feel that when I sit down here to write at my control center that I have to espouse something beautiful and awesome. Something that will make people nod their heads and run out into the (empty) street (looking both ways first) and scream -
or whatever kind of one-handed food they love. Pizza and muffins work up there too.
I have a feeling that the majority of the people who read this are people I know. I hope it's not (no offense Mom) and I want to be getting the word out there to some one else who needs it too ya know?
What the heck am I talking about?
Today I got my feelings hurt and it's all because I'm trying to be part of a community of devs on Twitter. See what people are talking about, see what all the hubub is about.
Today some guy who I don't even follow, someone else I follow liked his tweet (which makes this worse for the wear) said that Python is by far the most inferior language he's used.
(I'm taking a moment to cry again on the inside)
This guy (judging by the body of his most recent tweets and his picture) is a senior dev somewhere probably writing code architecture that's holding the threads of reality from unraveling.
I almost lashed out. I almost actually commented on it and said something like "Why" or "Why didn't your mother love you?" or "you must be from an alien planet where programming is like eating ice cream or something buddy" or "My name is Inigo Montoya. You've disgraced my language. Now you must die."
But I didn't say any of those things. I don't like to get into knife fights on Twitter. I'm obviously not going to change this guy's mind and all the things I'm feeling about what he's said aren't about him, they're about me.
Guess what. After my subconcious spiraled for a few hours and I questioned everything I've been doing for the last few years (and the five hours I spent on this flipping awesome thing that I started building last night/this morning), I decided this guy can go live his best life. And I'm glad he feels comfortable enough to share his far reaching hurtful opinions about the language I love.
Python is flipping awesome. It's so dang easy to write. It's so dang easy to understand and there is literally no barrier to entry as far as any programming language goes. It just works. For me anyway.
But enough about dude.
Look how much I wrote there. LOOK AT HOW MUCH I WROTE. This guy, he got under my skin.
I started working on something that is interesting.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it or not (this is a joke, I have) but I'm working through a book called "Data Visualization with JavaScript" as a sort of introduction to JS for myself.
The first part has been pretty easy to get up and running but I encountered an issue that the author either didn't account for or now I'm thinking, they planned it so I would do something like this.
There's part where the author is all like - "yo we're going to make a line graph now, here's a URL of where they keep the data"
and I was like "woah cool lemme go get the data"
and the data was like "uhh I'm in text format, how are you going to get me into a js file without formatting me line by line which will take an hour or so for sure.....newb."
me - "Err..thanks for that.. I'm not sure, I'll look to this book for guidance"
author - "here's the line graph. I am definitely not going to mention anything on how I went from knowing where the data is located, to using it. subtext: you're on your own buddy!"
me - (groans loudly)
data - (groans, not quite as loud but still definitely audible and it's a tad disconcerting seeing as though that data is inanimate)
author - (probably sipping on a tasty hot beverage on the 7th floor of a hotel in Paris, admiring the view of the river Seine and the Eiffle tower)
I think I may have joked in my last post about how I was thinking about writing a python program that would format the data into a js file for me.
This was without knowing if this was even possible. And I did it.
I freaking did it.
It kind of took me forever and as I was working on it I kept getting to points where I knew I had it and I wanted to quit and celebrate but I kept working on it more and more until it really started to develop out of the beginning-of-a-project stage.
It feels amazing stalkers. Truely amazing to construct something out of scratch like that. And I'm postive there is probably a better way overall to do what I did last night but I don't give a flying fish. It solves a problem that I was having
I got to use some of my newfound data organizing/manipulating/augmentation skillz. I used most of the things I have been practicing on Dataquest so that path of learning doesn't feel so useless to me now.
Well here's the repo. Go check it out for yourself.
Or don't.
!date