Hackbright week 7

Keeping interested when nothing works

It’s Monday. I’m suffering. I forget everything we learned about Javascript, jQuery and AJAX and I badly need a refresher. Lindsay patiently helps me and I manage to set up a functioning text editor (medium-editor), and place my content on tabs on a second column in a very simple bootstrap template. I feel like a bull in a china shop. At the end of the day I have broken the file upload and it turns out to be a super stupid thing, but I have to stay up until midnight to figure it out. I have cookies for dinner.

I spend Tuesday struggling with elements I want to add to the site but refuse to work. A map with pins for locations? Doesn’t work. A Twitter search widget for people names? Twitter won’t let me. Text highlighting for entities? Nope. I need a small victory here and there, and programming doesn’t always give you one. I have cereal for dinner.

saved some for eating

Wednesday I decide to take a break from front-end sadness and implement memcache to help speed up some of the functions.It means I have to re-structure a lot of my code. About 4.30 pm after rebuilding a bunch of dictionaries, MEMCACHE WORKS!!! That’s my small victory right there, and I feel like working gain. Unfortunately motivation always kicks in a 10pm. I have cookies for dinner, but different cookies.

I don’t know what I’m doing all Thursday. I make tiny, microscopic steps towards making things workable, and then they break again. I generate a couple of JSON objects that will return my geo information and the highlight items more efficiently. Sharon comes to visit and we have a nice chat. By the end of the day Highlighting WORKS. It’s like a miracle. I click that button a zillion times. I click this button for dinner.

Friday is a happier day. with the help of Sean I get my google map working and loading fast. Buggy, yes. So by the end of the week I realize I’ve been a frustrated mess, but at the end of the week I have acomplished way more than I thought I would have at the end of week 2. This is what it looks like now:

apparently my NER tagger thinks “Nazi Germany” is a special place

So I have to remind myself that it only *feels* like shit is taking forever, but it’s not. It’s only been 2 weeks and look at it: it sort-of works! Now I have 3 options: I can add more little things like images or news search. I can try to add support for more input languages. Or I can start thinking about how to deploy this given the many things I have to keep running in the background. More on that next time!