SqueeBlog

Code Year

2012-01-25T15:44:44Z

You wish for a convenient way to make sure you actually sit down and practice JavaScript on a regular basis, and as if by magic, Code Year arrives.

As I type, we are in the middle of Week 3, and so far the lessons have mostly involved getting to grips with basic programming concepts and typing them out over and over and over again.

Each week reviews the lessons from the previous week, to make sure they are thoroughly hammered home.

I, for one, am finding that an extremely useful approach. I have more programming books than I care to admit impulse-buying, and many of them have a tendency to cover all of the basics in Chapter 1, and then go 'got all that? excellent, now let's use absolutely all of them in a slightly vague context'.

I exaggerate slightly; but only slightly.

I think that one of the things that is particularly easy to neglect or underestimate when talking about teaching a beginner something that you yourself know well is how difficult and important it is to become comfortable with the language.

You can't write before you can read; and you can't effectively engage with a problem if you don't have a vocabulary to construct a meaningful response.

Take music, for example.

The first five grades of music theory are largely an exercise in learning how a (classical) score is constructed. It's learning all the elements that go on to the page, how they are organised in relation to one another, and how they translate into physical action.

You can pass grade 5 theory without playing - or, indeed, hearing - a note. You'll learn a lot that you'll only half-remember, and it sure as hell won't make you a musician.

The point of doing it - and the reason why grade 5 theory is and should be a prerequisite for the higher grades - is that if you can look at a score and understand what the lines and dots are asking you to do, that frees you to think about performance and interpretation without getting caught up in deciphering the basics.

So it goes, I find, with programming.

One of the things I've heard a lot is that the way to learn is to find a problem that you really want to solve and figure out how to do it. Much as I agree that you only really retain information if it is useful to you, there are in my experience a couple of problems with that approach when it comes to anything that is, essentially, in a different language.

Firstly, if you're building with no foundations, that's going to affect the finished product... as most of the websites currently on the internet can ably demonstrate.

I was recently involved in organising pre-interview skills tests for a junior web developer position, and some of the HTML pages they sent through looked fine on the screen but were built like a house of cards. The smallest change would plunge one into a whole afternoon of rewrites and swearing.

The thing with front-end development is that practically everyone dives straight in and builds a real website. That's one of the things that makes it so exciting: within hours, you can have the website that you wanted. It might not be perfect (okay, it definitely won't be perfect), but it will be there, something that you built yourself and people around the world can see.

However, if you then want to build a good website, you'll probably be looking at unlearning a lot of cheap hacks.

It also goes without saying that the same 'dive in and build what you want' principle translates far less well to a first programming language than it does to HTML, unless what you dream of is, say, a way to generate random numbers from 1 to 6. The level at which the fun stuff starts is unavoidably higher.

Secondly, my experience has always been that I do not use JavaScript very much outside the usual bells and whistles, because it simply doesn't occur to me as an option. I'm not familiar enough with its capabilities to look at a problem and think 'aha, JavaScript'll get around that one'.

It's like all those weird and wonderful bits of twisted metal that you see in cookery shops. If I knew what they did, they might transform my kitchen experience. I don't, so I solve everything the messy longwinded way with whichever knife comes to hand.

This is where I think Code Year is so far working well for me.

Three weeks sounds like a long time to be repeating the basics, but the basics are sticking; and while the example programs have all been extremely simple so far, I can see how they work as building blocks for bigger things.

The other criticism that I have seen regarding Code Year has focused on the relative lack of formal teaching/pedagogical theory, and while I can to some extent see where they are coming from, I think they are also missing the point.

Code Year is, in essence, a tool offering structured practice. It's 'teach yourself', with everything that that term implies: you're given the starting point, and it's up to you to work through it in a thoughtful way.

I have seen people ask what they are supposed to learn by copying and pasting to win the little reward badges, to which I can only reply, why are you copying and pasting?

Typing things yourself and working out where you've made mistakes is how you learn. If you game the system to get badges faster, do not then complain that the badges aren't magically conferring wisdom.

I realise of course that, like all personal challenges, it's probably best for confident self-starters - and as a home-educated OU graduate, I take self-starting to a pathological level.

That said, I think that the Code Year interface is fun and friendly enough that I would feel pretty comfortable with recommending it to a lot of people that I know.

And in the meantime, I'm enjoying feeling as though I'm making some real progress towards something that's been on the 'to do... tomorrow' list for some years!

Goals for 2012

2012-01-02T10:17:21Z

As this journal is no longer a slightly nerve-wracking extension of the 'hobbies & interests' section of my CV, and one of my aims for this year is to do more with my many and varied social media doodads, I thought I would start by posting this year's Goals list over here as well as on the fiercely guarded LiveJournal.

This led immediately to an unexpected additional challenge - remembering how the heck one logs in to Movable Type - but I'm in now, so here we go!

Creative:

Complete first draft of last year's NaNo novel
Complete short story
Share short story with at least two real people.
Take successful photo on manual settings. (Photos of total blackness do not count, even if taken at night.)
Sing in public at least once
Grow at least one type of squash.
Successfully grow at least six types of chilli pepper
Draw one picture, in any medium, per month.
Attend a dance class of some description.

Web Development:

Build and launch web development blog
Improve JavaScript
Learn Expression Engine
Read up on SEO
Learn Photoshop in some sort of proper structured manner.
Work through one of the Learnable courses that I have paid for many times over, dammit

Miscellaneous:

Be less of a passive consumer of social media. Post things occasionally.
Add to savings every month.
Eat healthier, smaller, more vegetable-involving meals.
Make soup to take into work, to avoid dying of M&S-induced boredom and/or salt overdose
Get halfway through the OU Certificate in Contemporary Science
Mend or replace broken wallet
Buy new computer mouse; end dysfunctional relationship with present computer mouse

...which should keep me busy for a while.

I am also vaguely intending to move the rest of Aeolian Squee to a proper CMS, but I am in a bit of a pickle over that one.

Ideally, I would have liked to use Matrix, as it's the one that I've been using daily for the last eighteen months and I can do all the things that I want to do without spending too much time learning. Unfortunately, Matrix is just about the only CMS that won't run on my current extremely generous hosting (needs PostgreSQL), so that scuppers that one.

Meanwhile, Work has thrown themselves enthusiastically at Expression Engine, so that could be a go-er - albeit an extraordinarily expensive go-er for a site that has half a dozen pages and is updated roughly biannually.

Heigh-ho. I suppose if all the questions were answered on the 2nd of January, it would make for a pretty dull rest-of-year.

Starting Small with Wet Felting

2010-06-08T07:08:11Z

Having discovered the joys of needle-felting, I was keen to have a go at its soggier, less pointy cousin, Wet Felting.

The online beginners' guides that I found tended toward the make-your-own-scarf end of felting, which, while tempting, was a bit more than I wanted to get into on a first go round. Quite apart from the sheer quantity of felt required, I figured that the rest of the household would be less than thrilled by my filling the bath with wool.

Luckily, the ever-crafty Jane Cameron found Wee Folk Art's guide to making wet felted wool cookie cutter ornaments, and was willing to trade felting supplies for my photographing her silk scarves.

We substituted the wooden skewers for metal forks (working on the principle that extra pointy bits equals faster felting), and the 'patting them dry with a towel' with 'wrapping them in a towel and stomping on them'.
How much the extra violence speeded up the whole process, I couldn't say, but it certainly added to the entertainment factor.

And here, following an hour or so of beading, is the finished item:

(The antennae are those little sticks that one uses for making dangly earrings. Alas, one of them got lost somewhere in the bowels of my book pile about ten minutes ago.)

I haven't quite decided whether I'm brave enough to wear it as a brooch yet - I've certainly lost a lot of other nice things to inadequate brooch pin tenacity - but the vague plan has always been to pin it to my sun hat for festivals and other fancy occasions.

We shall see...

Coming eventually to SqueeBlog: Fun with marzipan, with special reference to a website that should be in everyone's bookmarks.

Early Adventures in Needle-Felting

2010-01-21T13:46:19Z

I promised you felt owls in the previous post, and felt owls you shall have!
But first...

Needle-Felting: A Very Brief Introduction

Needle felting is a craft that uniquely combines the fun of making adorable fuzzy ornaments with the catharsis of voodoo dolls.

Basically, it involves turning wool into felt by stabbing it vigorously with a special barbed needle. The barbs cause the wool fibres to matt together - the more you stab, the firmer it becomes, until finally you end up with a solid piece of felt. The technique can be used for embellishment (such as the bunnies on this beautiful felted bag), sculpture (like this fluffy needle-felted fox), and, as I discovered in the process of researching this post, 'wool painting'.

It's a tad scary to begin with (the needle is a thoroughly evil-looking piece of kit), but once you've got the general idea it's all fairly straightforward. I found rolling the wool into balls the hardest bit - the actual felting seemed to be mostly a matter of persistence.

The Owls

Here we have Owl Attempt #1 (left) and Owl Attempt #2 (right):

(Owl #1 is a little unsteady, hence the paper stand.)

I used the same amount of wool for both owls: the only difference was that I was less tentative the second go around and stabbed more thoroughly.
As you can see, it made quite a dramatic difference to the size!

Owl #2 also feels a lot firmer and more structurally sound. That said, both of them have proven capable of surviving being trundled around in my bag-on-wheels, so I reckon Owl #1 has every chance of making it on to next year's Christmas tree despite the more tentative felting.

I didn't time myself, but reckon they must have taken about twenty minutes each.

My Verdict

Overall, I'm very taken with needle-felting.
It has the major advantage that you can be up and running making simple cute things within the hour (ideal for us impatient beginners!) - and for the more ambitious crafter, the possibilities seem virtually endless.

I haven't yet decided what my next felting project will be (the smart money's on it involving some kind of woodland creature), but I think it's safe to assume that there will be some kind of kit winging its way to me in the very near future!

Credits

My owl kit was bought from Etsy seller Fancy Tiger, who does many other felting kits ranging from bunnies to Barack Obama. Well worth checking out!

New Year, New Aeolian Squee!

2010-01-15T21:36:02Z

Yes, folks, Aeolian Squee has finally relaunched, with, among other things, more photographs, more shiny JavaScript, and perhaps most importantly, more purple.

Things are likely to be a little bit shaky while I work out which obscure but vital things haven't been uploaded yet (there's bound to be something), but so far, it all seems to be ticking along much as expected.

(All this, and I've also made two needle-felted owls today - it's amazing how being stuck at home with a cold can up ones productivity!)

Over the coming weeks, I should start to get some proper content up on this blog - starting, most likely, with piccies of the owls.

Do stop by again soon!