Day 22: Maps ahoy!
>>> Brief summary
Oh my goodness, ladies and gents, Holy Hallelujah, Batman, we have a map and it’s got a polygon layer of all the countries (plus a lot of confusing semi-sovereign states and British protectorates) and it’s be-you-tee-full. Thanks to this wonderful example of building polygons out of fusion tables and a significant amount of time spent banging my head and anyone else’s head I could find against the developer console, we realized that even though I was passing in my Google-given API Key and my fusion table id correctly, I hadn’t clicked this freaking button:
which was the key to overcoming that haunting 403 error. But a strong cup of tea and a focused 10 minutes with Joel saved the day. Huzzah! Look! I even styled it a bit!
I also took some time to fix a bug with my score calculation route so it would scale more nicely to handle tallying more than one question, tried my hand at some JavaScript to prevent users from submitting the quiz for grading without filling the whole thing out, and laid the groundwork for the third question about primary languages (which rekindled my fond feelings for sets, after a bit).
Now I’ve got to write the JS to interact with it tomorrow :)
>>> Where I struggled
Explaining my issue effectively to different people to get help. Today was a great exercise in how different helpers need different information — some people need the 10,000 foot view of your project before they can dive in, some want you to point at each line and parse it out loud, and some need 5 minutes of silent reading before any help can begin.
Where I didn’t struggle today was with planning. I spent a nice 20 minutes this morning before I even started coding writing out my plans for the day and the questions I needed to ask people along the way. I guided myself, and it was simple and lovely.
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
- The juice is worth the squeeze.
- In programming, it seems, forgiveness is the highest virtue. Except usually the only person sitting around waiting for forgiveness from me is myself. I had a hard time forgiving myself for having to work from an example instead of being able to sound out the JavaScript for parsing the fusion table on my own (and honestly, passing things into the URL to draw the map still doesn’t make too much sense to me, so I need to read more about that). Also, the fact that I’d been hot on the right trail for the last few days and had failed to effectively investigate the 403 error sitting in my browser’s console was, I felt, worth beating myself up over.
I know that impulse doesn’t help anyone, and it definitely hurts me. But I bet many other programmers, particularly lady-bodied ones, might be fighting the same internal fight. If you are, I’d love to hear from you. I’d love it even more if we could somehow solve the inefficiency and general unpleasantness of self-blame together.
