Day 16: Everything is broken. Typical.

>>> Brief summary == Where I struggled

Things are definitely getting harder at a much faster rate than I am getting better. I tried to put my login/signup forms back in a modal window today and I pretty much broke all of my routes. Because I wanted to put my modal window in my base.html, and because I am creating my forms using WTForms and Flask-WTF, this means I need to pass in a few parameters to Jinja in order to render the form. This works fine, until I try to submit one of the forms and move on to a new route. That new route has an html page that inherits from base.html, which means it’s got all of those Jinja variables sitting in it, except now that new route isn’t passing Jinja any variables, so I’m getting a big fat variable undefined error.

As I write this realize that really the only way forward for me at this point is to do the thing I don’t want to do, and give myself a landing page with a signup/login modal window, and then start my base.html page on the first /home route, after all of the signing up and logging in is over. Maybe that’s why people have landing pages…anyways, after this post, I’m on it.

I continued to battle Mapbox documentation. For someone who has a good handle on maps, or a good amount of experience with JavaScript, go ahead and look down your nose at me. But for someone who is both a beginner developer and new to maps (and, like, how many people know a lot about making maps with computers who aren’t developers?) the documentation for starting out with Mapbox Studio is unwieldy. It’s all very narrowly-focused tutorials and no exhaustive “here’s a list of all the CSS properties, or here’s how to make 50 common layers.” Noted, for when I make an open-source product of some kind — catalogue first, then write specific exercises.

Today was my first day where nothing about Athena got better and most things got worse. In fact, I was feeling so bad by 3pm that I did that thing many eager and slightly anxious people do, and I cast around for something else to do that was a ‘productive’ secret break. I was so desperate, I actually found working on my resume a refuge from my project.

What. What?

No honest young person likes working on their resume. In case you’d forgotten, dear reader, working on your resume feels a lot like bathing suit shopping. Unless you’re in some really special circumstance, you’ll probably need a resume at some point. You’ve got an old one lying around that you know you shouldn’t be using (ever again) and gosh it takes a surprising amount of nerve to get started, doesn’t it? You want your peers to review it and yet want to hide it from them forever. The further along you get with the whole process, somehow the worse it feels, until what stops you isn’t usually the joy of success, but rather “meh, good enough” layered on top of “Ijustcan’tdothisanymore.” You want to start the process when you’re feeling good about yourself, so you can endure.

And here I was, today, basically bathing suit shopping the day after Thanksgiving, to stretch the metaphor. Only somehow, it felt slightly different this time. I actually had things to leave off. I used a nice basic template I found on Google Docs and didn’t fuss with the formatting much. The whole thing came together in about 30 minutes, one straight shot. It might not win a bikini contest, but honestly that’s not what I’m going for.

>>> Thoughtful takeaway

For the first time, I know exactly what I’m going for: a full-stack engineering position at a mid-size company with a clear on-boarding and mentorship process, an ethic of empowerment and learning through doing that is directly reflected in the things made there. And I want to help make those things.

I’m proud of the four years of hard work I put into my previous career. But I was surprised to see the things I learned in the past 8 weeks are taking up more resume space. And that’s just two short months!

Imagine what it’ll look like next year.