Monthly Archives: January 2014
Why Did You Leave Teaching for Web Development?
This is a question I’ve gotten asked a lot in my quest to change careers. If you’ve ever worked in education, especially as a teacher, you no doubt already have some ideas about what my answer will be. If you haven’t, here’s the explanation:
First, I decided I needed to leave teaching. I was looking for something that involved less direct “customer contact”, was more financially viable for a single person in Seattle, and was related to tech (a growing field with endless things to learn about). I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into instructional design, engineering, project management, or technical writing, so I took some time to explore.
After interviewing career advisors, multiple tech-related departments at UW, taking informal Web Design courses, and talking to my friends in various careers, I decided to take the intro CSE courses at UW (starting with Java) while continuing to teach. Not only did I pass said course, I found it wonderfully challenging and relevant. I took another, this time in web programming, and I loved it. I felt powerful. I felt like I actually accomplished something. I felt like I was learning and enjoying working with others. Programming is about language just as much as teaching ESL. Syntax, semantics, vocabulary, grammar. They are all related. I’m just happy I didn’t wait any longer than I did to make the switch.
Ulterior Motives
It’s funny. You never hear the word “ulterior” unless it’s collocated (associated) with “motives”. I guess it means “hidden”, “not obvious” or even “devious”? You hear a lot about exterior and interior, but how “ulterior” fits in is not entirely clear.
Anyway, you may have heard the expression, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Regardless of the fact that this was coined somewhere around 1930 when indeed, free lunches were hard to come by, in the tech community in Seattle you might change it to “There’s no such thing as a free beer.” But actually, this week, I have indeed enjoyed both free beer and a free lunch. Oh, and a free JavaScript tutorial from an actual human being!
On Monday, I joined the “Learn JavaScript the Right Way” meetup in Ballard to go over homework assignments. One highlight was drinking hot chocolate in a tea shop. Another highlight was breaking Code Academy via an infinite loop in one of their JavaScript exercises. Surprising, because I’m sure I’m not the first person to write an infinite loop on Code Academy. A further highlight was the helpful spirit and community feel of the meetup. We had one “expert” who happily answered all our silly (and not so silly) questions. We shared resources, and I’m really looking forward to next week!
On Tuesday, it was South Lake Union for Code Fellows’ open house. You’ve no doubt heard of these coding “bootcamps” and have strong opinions about them. Let’s skip that. I mostly wanted to see what the place was like, how it compared to another for-profit school (that may or may not contain the letters “ITT” in the name), and get the aforementioned free beer. Check, check, and check. Way more legit than the unnamed school (I used to work there so I guess I’d know), and totally relevant to Seattle’s job market. Wow, I’m kind of talking myself into applying as I write this. If anyone would like to “sponsor” me, I can promise you free access to my blog posts for life.
On Wednesday, it was to “Impact HUB” (not to be confused with The Hub at UW), located on the block in Seattle that receive more 911 reports than any other single street. Awesome. Despite subtly closed blinds and muffled homeless yelling across the street, we enjoyed an 8+ hour workshop on using PhoneGap, Apigee, and Codiqa to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and jQuery (and jQuery mobile). And that’s where the free lunch comes in. I got much more comfortable with the command line, learned more about jQuery mobile (although I’m not sure how much of a “thing” it really is), and am psyched to see Worry Wart in an app store near you soon.
So I’m sorry to say that I am very cynical and fully expected a “pitch” at both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s events. I even had my cynical face on, which I’m making at this very moment. Since I don’t want to scare you away, I’ll just pretend that this Mac doesn’t have a camera built in right now. Luckily, I was proven wrong, and on top of free beer and a free lunch, I met some cool people and learned some cool things. And I’ll stop there because based on that last sentence, I’m running out of adjectives.
Obligatory New Year’s Post
What I’m most excited for this year:
Another great year in a great house with a great dog and a host of great friends and family coming and going. Here’s to wassail!
Learning even more about coding and web development: currently taking a Udacity Mobile Web course online and a Python course through Girl Develop It (who are awesome) “irl”. I can never decide if using “irl” makes me sound like I’m stuck somewhere in ICQ circa 1998 or like I’m an awesome text-savvy social media user not a day over 25. Hmmmm…
Ramping up career from intern/learner/networker/experimenter to full-time-employee/learner/networker/experimenter. Hint, hint.
And in case you were wondering how long I would go with just “the girl the dog”, I am finally being well-distracted from my increasing nerdiness on weekends by, you guessed, it, “the boyfriend”(!!!). So that is one other, non-code-related item that turns out to make everything in this new year just that much brighter.
Happy New Year!
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Christmas is over. So why haven’t I taken down my extraordinary (pink) Christmas tree? If the preceeding question doesn’t answer itself, then we have nothing left to talk about.
But I wanted to explain (read: brag about) my awesome side projects (Christmas presents) that were done in addition to completing a quarter at school and setting up an entirely new website at the internship (to go live sometime this month!).
First challenge: A “Worry Wart” website for Mom/every woman in the world to store worries for them. This needed a database, tables interacting with each other, a somewhat secure way to access, read, and write to the database, login, log out, create a new user, store session variables, count worries that came true vs worries that never happened, add and delete worries. Whew! I think that might be about it.
If you’re interested, check out worrywart.jessicawicksnin.com. If you’re really interested, check out my code on git hub (jwicksnin).
Second challenge: A “Benjamin Speaks” app for Dad/every retirement-savvy person to aid them in financial decision making. This took CSS to create a neat shadowed “quote bubble” and awesome jQuery to take a submitted question, find a suitable (random) answer in a text file, and output the random answer. Nothing too fancy, but the image of a $100 bill that I gleaned from Google addressing my dad directly is really cute.
Third challenge: A “Facebook for Two” for my boyfriend/every couple who too busy actually having a relationship “IRL” to document every stage of their relationship on actual Facebook. This took some serious JavaScript because a text file wasn’t good enough – I was determined to use the word AJAX as much as possible. I ended up using a quick PHP file to write from JavaScript to the existing XML file on the server. So now I feel very comfortable reading and writing XML files based on user input via AJAX requests. It’s basically a poorly-styled Facebook, which made me question the value of Facebook at $100,000(?) a share if I can build the same thing in a couple weeks with nothing but Google and Web Programming Step by Step (thank you CSE at UW) for help.
Life Without Plugins
Here are some things I heart doing in WordPress:
Creating new custom post types without a plugin
Creating custom fields (i.e. meta boxes) without a plugin
Creating widgets without a plugin
Editing post types and widgets without a plugin
Importing styles without a plugin
Hmmm.. do we see a pattern emerging? Somewhere in the past month or so I think I may have made friends with WordPress, because lately, instead of hunting through files for hours looking for one certain variable, I’m able to blow through a “To Do” list and continue to be amazed when my first or second attempt simply works.
And I’ve decided that I definitely belong to the “less is more” camp when it comes to plugins. Especially since we have multiple users and developers and who knows who doing who knows what on the admin side, keeping plugins like Custom Post Type at a minimum is essential to make sure that changes to the functionality of the site are only done by someone relatively qualified. As we learned on the current (old) site, even something simple like slug, category, and page names can wreak havoc on something as major as permalinks and redirects. Isn’t that the point of WordPress, to make content easy to add and change without having to affect code?
Here are some awesome things I’ve done recently sans plugin:
- Sort posts alphabetically and by custom field (meta) value
- Create new custom post types loosely based on existing custom post types
- Trick WordPress into not pre-prending the entire blog url to an inputed url (http://www.google.com as opposed to http://www.myblog.com/category/www.google.com)
- Even though the current theme relies on an icon library linked to CSS rules like “content: /e701”; to display sociable icons (instead of using separate icon files), maintain the styles for the icon library while using my own sociable icon not included in the library. Sort of hacky, totally awesome. This took CSS, PHP, WordPress, and icon library know-how.
- Formatting widgets in the admin side and how they are displayed on the live site.
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