I’ve been coding since 1982 and I just hit 100 days.

LyndaN
LyndaN
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

#100DaysOfCode! Whoo! What the hell, that sounds easy. I mean, I made my first website in 1997, and kept making terrible websites for 5 years, until websites with templates started happening, and then I became a CSS fiddler. Then…I forgot?

The first time I officially coded, I was 8 years old and my Nan was reading directions to me out of a book called Basic Fun With Graphics The Atari Way by Margaret Ann Zuanich and Susan Drake Lipscomb. What we did was a lot more involved than printing Hello World, but everything we made is saved on C60 cassettes because that’s how programs were saved in 1982 and there’s no way to port them to a PC. Those tapes sound terrible in a boombox.

In May my phone was stolen. This sucked because all my progress in Grasshopper went with it, along with the contents of my Mum’s purse: our money for the month, all our ID, and the kind of irreplaceable stuff mums carry in their purses for some bizarre reason, like locks of hair from two of our late dogs.

As far as replacement phones go, the Alcatel Raven that Safelink sent me is a pretty spiffy one. I had to start over on Grasshopper, and this time I used it every day. Most of the exercises had me changing attributes and fine tuning forEach loops, but I was learning new stuff, and I understood the old stuff better than I ever did, and I’d use what I’d learned. Some of it, anyway.

Today Grasshopper tells me I’ve been using the app for 100 days. I completed all the exercises long ago, but I still do the quizzes to keep the functions fresh.

What, you thought I was going to release the next Fortnite?

To celebrate, I made a game. I followed a Free Code Camp tutorial, but the graphics are all mine, based on my comic strip Tails From the Backyard.

Tails From The Backyard Memory Game on CodePen, https://codepen.io/LyNac/full/gdWBPQ/

The game is a classic memory game, dependent on JavaScript and is my first flexbox project. I posted it to CodePen because my account deserved something decent after a whole year of neglect.

Sitting and coding makes my neck hurt. September is the awareness month for both Chiari and Dystonia, two utter bullshit conditions I’ve had to live with all my life. It’s partly why I’ve never coded 100 days straight before. While I was working on this project, there were days when I’d wake up with my double vision being extra blurry, even with my glasses on. But just like drawing the comic strip the game ties into, I keep coding because I enjoy it and my neck is going to hurt anyway, what with all the looking under hedges for sick hobo kittens and record heatwaves. Chiari and Dystonia: they suck.

2018 has been a year of extremes for a lot of people. This game I made is silly and won’t cure whatever horrors the world has for us, but here it is, kids. Share and enjoy.


Lynda is too old for this and yet never grew up. She can be found in comic form at TailsFromTheBackyard.com and under various trees in The Bronx.

Thanks to Glitzy Babylon for beta testing and making me come back to the Internet every day.

LyndaN

Written by

LyndaN

She/Her. Descendant of immigrants & veterans. Caregiver. I ❤︎ animals & music. Wrote a book at age 3. Became a comic strip in 2004. Sometimes my brain hurts.

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