Days 25–28: The end is near
>>> Brief overview
Forgive me Medium for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last post.
I really needed a break these past four days. I didn’t get one, of course; it’s the last big push of our sprint towards code freeze for our Hackbright projects and I’ve been hacking away and happily breaking things for the last few days. Through some miracle (and a lot of well-timed coffee runs) Athena finally has a reasonably clear workflow and everything I tried to implement I did two of (two form submissions from a modal window, two interactive maps with google fusion tables, two API calls). Hopefully this week I can deploy and it’ll all be up for your viewing pleasure on The World Wide Web.
The biggest win I’ve had is getting my Twilio piece working; if you’re logged in to Athena and you’d like to sign up to receive text message questions for capitals, you can do that (I haven’t quite figure out how to send 1 per day to anyone who is signed up, but I have a few buttons that can fake it). I’ve had about 100 texts from my new friend Athena. We’re besties now. And my scores for Europe are definitely improving.
The site is still hideous. I’m really hoping the next 48 hours of CSS magical support is enough to bring this thing from a child’s bootstrapped finger-painting to a polished portfolio piece, because that’s all the time we’ve got. And if not, well maybe that’ll convince anyone who wants to interview me that I know how to prioritize, and my priorities were with the skeleton and the muscles, not the hair and make-up.
Strong is the new sexy.
>>> Where I struggled
I refuse to brag-plain about all the hard work or time that’s gone into this project and the ratio of features I imagined vs. got (not bad, actually, because I made a realistic plan). I have loved this project. It has been the second half of the absolute best three months of my adult life.
“Hold up,” you say. “Brag-plain? What are you babbling about?” You’ve seen that smug look on someone’s tired face when they exclaim “I just spent 14 hours on [insert work-related nonsense]!” and somehow you know that if they can just beat you on that number, then they can count this day in the W column, as if anyone ever wanted to spend 14 hours on something (other than a yacht)*. So I refused to put myself in the position of total exhaustion. I feel pretty good. I went out to dinner on Saturday and ate some delicious fish. I saw the new James Bond movie. I took a yoga class and slowly enjoyed possibly the greatest cup of Philz coffee that ever existed with a non-engineer. We gabbed about boys.
But more interestingly, I sort of happily struggled down all those mini-rabbit holes of JavaScript you can fall into when formatting Google maps. I made myself a new icon for flagging continents, flipped back and forth about the opacity and color of my polygons, and spent a weird amount of time trying to come up with a way to disable the ‘x’-out in the infowindow label (there’s no Big G-sanctioned way, so I hacked it by setting this baby in my <style>:
img[src=”https://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/api-3/images/mapcnt6.png"] { display: none; }
Thank you, Inspect Element!
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
I loved the struggle this week. And I’m so amped for the next phase. This evening I popped open Cracking the Coding Interview and took a swing at the first Strings and Arrays question. And, standing in my pajamas in front of my own whiteboard in my tiny kitchen, marker in hand, everything I thought I knew seemed to go out of my head like sand in a timer.
Jeebus. The struggle has just begun.
*Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Tell me where you work and if you’re looking for new engineers, or someone to write your blog part time. I’ll apply right now.
