The course

Week 2 of SEI at General Assembly has come to a close and it has been an intense but interesting week. With the labour day long weekend giving us a nice peaceful Monday we had to cram the normal 5 days' worth of work into 4. There was a wide range of topics covered for such a short period of time, we were introduced to CSS and HTML, taught how to manipulate the DOM, messed around with vanilla javascript animation and got introduced to the Jquery library.

HTML and CSS

This week was not my first introduction to HTML or CSS, I have dabbled in the basics a few times over the last 10 years, so there weren't too many surprises in this section of the course. The exercises have reminded me that I need to do some reviews of more modern website design principles as I find many of my sites look old-fashioned, similar to the websites I grew up with. If anyone has any suggestions for books, blogs or tools for designing more modern sites please post suggestions in the comment section.

Vanilla Javascript Animation

all of the below code was needed to make a vase wiggle on a shelf for possibly 5 seconds. The total animation lasted about 20 seconds and took 150 lines of code and about 4 hours of coding and calculations to get pixel position triggers to work properly and flow through the full animation. Needless to say, manually animating objects with javascript is about as much fun as pulling teeth. I am really hoping that the CSS animations that we cover later in the course will be less code intensive or fiddly.

function vaseRockForward(){
    // console.log('max', max)
    if (max===0){
        clearInterval(vaseCount)
        return;
    }
    let vaseAllAngle = vase.style.transform;
    if(vaseAllAngle.length===12){
        var vaseOldAngle = vaseAllAngle[7]
    }else{
        var vaseOldAngle = vaseAllAngle.slice(7,9)
        // console.log(vaseOldAngle)
    }    
//    console.log(vaseAllAngle.length)
    let vaseNewAngle = Number(vaseOldAngle) + 1;
    vase.style.transform = `rotate(${vaseNewAngle}deg)`
    if(vaseNewAngle===max){
        // console.log('stop')
        clearInterval(vaseCount)
        vaseCount = setInterval(vaseRockBackward,50);
    } ;
}

function vaseRockBackward(){
    let vaseAllAngle = vase.style.transform;
    if(vaseAllAngle.length===12){
        var vaseOldAngle = vaseAllAngle[7]
    }else{
        var vaseOldAngle = vaseAllAngle.slice(7,9)
        // console.log(vaseOldAngle)
    } 
    // console.log(vaseOldAngle)
    let vaseNewAngle = Number(vaseOldAngle) - 1;
    vase.style.transform = `rotate(${vaseNewAngle}deg)`
    if(vaseNewAngle===-Math.abs(max)){
        // console.log('stop')
        clearInterval(vaseCount)
        max=max-1
        vaseCount = setInterval(vaseRockForward,50);
    } ;
}

Jquery

I am glad I didn't have to work directly with the DOM for a decade before being given Jquery. It has taken one of the more code-intensive aspects of Javascript and made it much quicker and simpler to use. I redid several exercises that took 15 lines of code and shrunk them down to 3 or 4. Between these exercises and Friday night's homework, I am feeling confident in my ability to do well in project 0 next week. I wonder if I will believe I deserved the optimism by the time I have presented it next Friday.

Networking

My positions in the past have not required much in the way of networking. In the role that did, I was less successful largely because it was not a skill I had ever learned. Friday night was the first GA alumni networking event that has been held since the covid outbreak. I would say 50+ people attended, I got to chat with a lot of older students in varying stages of their careers, and find out about what life looks like at the other end of this course. One thing I will have to focus on more at the next event is remembering more names. I have managed to follow up with a few of the wonderful people I met on LinkedIn, but there are many others whose faces and names have been lost in the blur. I also came to the realisation that while I may have Twitter and LinkedIn I don't know the account names well enough to even give them to people. I believe this coming week's outcomes class is on personal branding, so that should help me solidify my understanding of how I should be marketing myself.

Extras

I am still reading through Limitless by Jim Kwik and enjoying this interesting take on the psychology of learning. There have been 2 big takeaways from the couple of chapters I have covered this week.

Pomodoros

A pomodoro is a block of time you use to focus on work before intentionally taking breaks to maintain focus. Even as I write this blog I have begun implementing these into my workflow when I am doing homework and studies. When we are learning we tend to retain more of what we learned at the beginning of the session, and at the end of the session, our biggest losses come from the middle. By breaking up studies into shorter periods, 25 on 5 off is what I am trialling currently, we are able to have more start/finish retention without losing as much in between. Coincidentally, the first day I read about pomodoros a classmate of mine mentioned them as a method for how she manages her time and stays focused.

Limiting Beliefs

Unsurprisingly a book titled limitless spends a lot of time discussing how to overcome our limitations. A key theme of the book is that a lot of our limitations are just false beliefs that hold us back. It discusses trying to catch those limiting beliefs and turning them around into empowering beliefs. Two of the biggest limiting beliefs I have found myself having as I come into this course are that I am bad with names, and struggle with a lot of the networking aspects. Anyone who has had a conversation with me knows I don't shut up and will happily talk with anyone, about pretty much any topic. To turn my limiting belief into an empowering belief I am trying to rewire my brain to stop thinking I am not good at networking, to believe that at the next event I will approach and meet more people, and convert more of those interactions into meaningful professional connections. The second limiting belief I have is about my design ability. I believe I have a reasonable command of CSS, I am still learning, but it is rare that I have a vision in my head that I cannot put onto the page. The vision tends to be my downfall, but instead of believing I am no good at it, I need to believe that with each project I have the opportunity to research more modern aesthetics, and implement a part of them, making each project looking better than the last.

Typing

My typing is still a work in progress, with my WPM while touch typing up to 34.3 on average, still a far cry short, but I am trying to build up that competency between exercises in class to keep myself busy.

Conclusion

I would call week 2 a success. I am feeling more confident and capable. I feel like my code for this weekend's homework is much better thought out, the networking event above all else has made me feel more comfortable about life after this course, and I feel like I am making some good friends along the way. The GA community is a really great group to be a part of.

From Transport to the Terminal