Learning A New Language

It’s Tuesday, October 7th and we yesterday was the beginning of Week 3 of The Iron Yard. As of last week we are learning JavaScript; talk about a mind wrecker.

Last night we created what appeared to be a very simple website. This website displayed a digital clock on the center of the screen. With that clock was a background that had a background color that changed colors ever so slightly every second. In CSS you can determine the color of your text or background in a few ways. One way is using rgb(#,#,#) (with # any number 0–255). If you look at digital clock it looks something like hh:mm:ss or ##,##,##. As you can see, time looks very similar to rgb. So we coded into JavaScript to convert our time into a rgb value. Here is the site I built for our homework assignment: http://warnerp18.github.io/ColorClock/index.html. It is still a work in progress and there are somethings I need to tweak before I’m finished, but I am about 95% of the way done. To really see what is happening on the page you need to stay on for atleast a minute. The best time to look would be at the end of an hour ex: 4:58 and watch it turn to 4:59 and then to 5:00.

It doesn’t sound all that difficult and when I started this project I figured I’d be able to finish it quite quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was not going to be able to finish quickly because nothing in this class has been easy. Had I looked at the website before attending The Iron Yard I would not have thought it would be a difficult site to build.

My days are now consumed with coding and The Iron Yard. Other than going to the gym at 5am I do nothing but work on homework or try and learn more so that I don’t feel like I’m going to fall behind. Every day is a struggle to ensure I’m keeping up with what is being taught. The class is extremely face paced. I feel as if I’m just one misstep away from falling so far behind I can’t catch up. I guess that is a normal feeling, they told us on day 1 that is how we are going to feel. There is just so much information to learn and process in twelve weeks that we are going to be pushed. That was no lie. Everyday we are pushed to learn and digest more and more.

Today, I am writing this up at 5pm at the school. At 7pm we have a speaker coming to the shared space to talk about testing in general and ‘Jasmine’. We, the class, were encouraged to attend this if we could make it. As coding has now consumed everything I will have time. I have never heard of Jasmine, but hopefully by the end of the “talk” I’ll have some clue as to what does. I’ll let you know how it went and if or what I learned in my next post.