A New Beginning, Part 10

Kalen Hammann
Jul 24, 2017 · 5 min read

“TALK WITH YOUR MENTOR.” BUT WHAT IF MY MENOR DOESN’T KNOW?

Session #3 with my mentor went better than the first couple of sessons. After my review of my notes I understood and could DO many of the basic tasks he set me. When he asked me, “Why won’t this code work,” I could frequently tell him what error message we would get, and why. I even knew how to fix it!

Toward the end of the session I told him I had not been able to figure out how to use the Google Chrome developer tools to track down what was over-riding my code in my app. He said, “I don’t want to spend more time chasing that down. Why don’t you ask Ken at Office Hours?”

I was really disappointed to hear that. As I worked through the lessons building my app, when I got to something that seemed like it would be too complex to explain simply my coaches there would often give me a hint and then say, “If that doesn’t do it, just use this workaround and at your next mentoring session you can talk with your mentor about it.” So I figured I could count on my mentor to help me straighten out pretty much anything.

Now my mentor seemed to have feet of clay. He said “I don’t want to take the time” but I suspected this was simply something even he didn’t understand.

Well, no one knows everything… To Office hours we go!

BACK ON THE ROLLER COASTER

Office Hours only happened Wednesday evenings, and my meeting with my mentor was on Thursday, so I had a while to wait before I could ask my question there. In the meantime, I went back to work on my app, figuring out how to add a feature all by myself.

At first everything went great. I was beginning to get my confidence back

Then suddenly I hit a snag. I couldn’t get the picture uploader that was supposed to let users upload pictures into the app — the core of the feature I was building — to work at all. I rechecked what I had done. Nothing. So I posted a question about it in the forum. Back came a horrifying answer: “You seem to have missed several steps. A lot of code is missing.”

I knew I was supposed to be doing this on my own, but I had been so careful! I was SURE I hadn’t skipped any steps. And WHAT code was missing?!

I went back to the beginning and logged every step I had taken, making sure I hadn’t missed anything. I spent a whole day and a half doing it. Nope. I was sure I had covered every base. And all the lines of code where right where they were supposed to be. I posted that I couldn’t find anything, enclosing a copy of my log and asking for guidance about what step I had missed.

Two different coaches answered that I was supposed to have mounted an uploader. But I HAD mounted an uploader! I had NOT missed that step. The code to mount it was RIGHT THERE! “SEE?!” I was yelling at my computer screen.

Then I saw it. The line of code where I mounted the uploader was supposed to say, “mount_uploader :picture, PictureUploader.” What it actually said was, “mount_uploader :picture, PictureUploaderm.”

I hadn’t missed the step. No code was missing. But the code was wrong, so the uploader wasn’t getting mounted, so it wasn’t working. So it APPEARED from how the app was functioning as if I had missed that step and omitted that code. Actually, I had a typo. One lousy character that didn’t belong there.

When I deleted the extra “m,” of course, the uploader worked like a charm. I uploaded a whole bunch of photos just to be sure. Worked every time!

DOWN the roller coaster to the bottom — “I’ll NEVER GET THIS! THIS IS TAKING WAY TOO LONG — EVEN IF I DO GET IT, IF I TAKE THIS LONG ON THE JOB I’LL BE FIRED!” Then back up — “A stupid TYPO! That’s not so bad. I can find typos. I’m even getting better every day at knowing where to look for them!”

WEEK FIVE: OFFICE HOURS

I had “lurked” at Office Hours just to see what they were like, and I’ve got to say, they were daunting. But imporessive. People could ask about anything, and most of what they asked about was way over my head. But I expected that. And I was happy to discover that I could usually at least follow the logic of what they were asking and Ken’s answers even if I had no idea what the specific content meant.

And I was blown away by Ken’s brilliance and the depth of understanding he demonstrated with every answer.

When it came to my question about how to use dev tools to find out where code was being over-ridden in my app, I was embarrassed to ask something so basic. But I did, and Ken graciously explained it. Then he showed me how to fix my app so it would do what I wanted.

It turns out that when I right click on an element on a web page displayed in the Google Chrome browser, a window pops up that shows the CSS code that is producing that element on the page. I knew that much. What I DIDN’T know was that at the very top of the little window was a link to the place in my code that was at the TOP of the hierarchy controlling the characteristics of that element.

What I didn’t know at ALL was that to fix things I didn’t even have to follow that link and change the code there. Instead, all I had to do was COPY the link at the top of the little window, paste it into the CSS page on my app, and then treat it as a new class that I can add formatting to in order to make the elment behave the way I want it to!

My reward for going through the embarrassment of asking was, now my app would do what I wanted it to AND now I knew how to solve issues like that in the future!

That put me at the TOP of the roller coaster. Until the next day…

(More to come… click here!)

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