A New Beginning, Part 8

Kalen Hammann
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

GOOGLE IS MY FRIEND, PART 2

It turned out, not surprisingly (at least it wouldn’t be surprising to anyone who knows me!), that I had been trying to make Blur1 too complicated. Who knew that you could pass a whole nested array as a single argument when initializing a class?! Many lines of code I had used to get an approximate answer were replaced by a single line that gave the exact answer.

When I asked why my code wasn’t being accepted to change the font of the link in my navigation bar, Kevin said, “What do you see when you inspect the element?” My answer was immediate if not eloquent: “Huh? How do I do that?”

“Which browser are you using?” “Safari.” “Well, Google Chrome is a lot better browser for developers. It’s got way better tools.” In fact, Ken had said that once early in the course and I had been meaning to check out what tools those were, but I hadn’t seen a need for them, so I hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, suddenly, a new world opened before me.

When I opened Google Chrome and went to my app, Keven showed me that right clicking on an element (like the link in my navbar that wasn’t accepting my CSS code) not only allowed me to see the html “source code” for the page as Safari did. It also let me see the CSS code that was CONTROLLING the html. And there we found the culprit: my beautiful CSS to change the font of the link had a LINE through it!

I knew that probably was causing the problem, but I still didn’t know what it meant. So I asked Kevin.

“It means code somewhere else up the hierarchy is over-riding your code for this element. Now you just need to use the tools to find out where it is. I’ll give you that as homework for next week. And get started on the next challenge, Blur2.”

Suddenly my week had become a lot more demanding.

RESTART YOUR RAILS SERVER!

As I continued to follow instructions, more and more of the steps were looking familiar. Add a new page. (The same way I added one before.) Add a new ACTION. (Change the controler to tell it what to do, then change the routes to point to that action.) Do a migration…

As I kept having steps not work for me even though I thought they should, I learned to sortcut the process of getting help by reading the posts OTHER people working on the same task had put up asking for help and learning from the help they had been offered. One of the most surprising bits of help: Sometimes, for no reason I could understand, I would have to restart my rails server before something would work, even though that need wasn’t mentioned in the lesson instructions and even though most other people didn’t seem to have any problem when they didn’t do it.

But when I added that to my routine for “what to do when something isn’t working,” amazingly often it helped.

I was beginning to feel less lost, more like I could figure out for myself what was going wrong more of the time. Then I came across a blog post that suggested what I was feeling was right on time.

THE INFLECTION POINT

In an answer to someone else’s question, the guy providing help had pointed to an idea that made a huge amount of sense and also a huge amount of difference. The idea was that at some point, successful software engineers move through an inflection point that vastly accelerates their progress and lays the foundation for real success: They go from following instructions to get things done to taking being stuck as an indication that it’s time to learn something new. So instead of just asking for help, they do a google search or look harder at their error messages and maybe THEN do a google search to see if they can figure out for themselves what is going on.

Most important, successful software engineers give up the idea that they will someday “arrive” and know what they need to know. Instead, they embrace the idea that their learning will continue as long as they are doing this work.

After reading that, I noticed that my attitude shifted subtly. I expanded my sense of what I was doing to look for opportunities to learn something new, beyond what the lessons were specifically offering. I actually began to look forward to something not working.

Until, that is, too many things stopped working at once.

(More to come… click here!)

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