Today's Progress: Implemented search in Hack ID Jekyll site
Thoughts: Started off from a tutorial (which I cited!), but there was work to do in styling the search results the way I wanted. Looks good! Last thing will be to style the search box in the navbar, so it doesn't break it.
Link to work: Hack ID Repo
Today's Progress: Finished and merged search feature in Hack ID site
Thoughts: Really pleased with the way it turned out. Also made some minor other updates. This marks my first merge by myself! Also learned to stash then apply stash to new branch in the case where I realize I need a new branch for saved but uncommited changes. See this stack overflow question Git: Create a branch from unstaged/uncommited changes on master.
Link to work: Hack ID Repo
Today's Progress: Made a PR for Oppia Issue
Thoughts: I dove straight back into the other open source project I contribute to, Oppia. It was a nice, small CSS issue (though it still caused me a bit of trouble), so I was able to make a PR today.
Link to work: Oppia PR
Today's Progress: Code Wars Kata Practice
Thoughts: I only finished one or two kata before getting stuck! I'd forgotten about Code Wars until I saw it in someone else's 100 Days of Code log. It's good for me to get back to practicing these sorts of things. I'm finding that my code is verbose when compared to many of the other solutions. I should probably take more time to look closely at them and try and copy their use of functions like map and slice.
Link to work: My Code Wars Profile
Today's Progress: Code Wars Kata Practice
Thoughts: I only finished one kata today. It's really good to be discovering my limitations with algorithms. I need to practice even MOAR.
Link to work: My Code Wars Profile
Today's Progress: Started Accessibility Audit and Another Tiny Game.
Thoughts: Missed yesterday :-( But, I realized that I really, really want to make the transition to developer. So I'll be starting technical interview practice soon! Today, I began a big accessibility audit for the Oppia project. My mentor there is awesome! I'm happy to improve my own knowledge with accessibility because I do think it's fundamental. Also, able to get back into game dev. I'm working on a tiny infinite scroller game with Phaser.
Link to work: Oppia Issue | New Game
Today's Progress: Continued with accessibility audit and tiny game
Thoughts: Still working my way through my Supply run infinite scroller game. Having some serious trouble with sprite bodies and collision. But I did get the game to the point where it's starting to look right. Inspiration for the feel comes from jetpack joyride.
Link to work: Oppia Issue | New Game
Today's Progress: Finished accessibility audit Oppia project, continued tiny game, and started on tech interview practice
Thoughts: Still working my way through my Supply run infinite scroller game. I'm slowly but surely fixing issues as they come up. However, I started on the interview Cake curriculum and I just keep realizing how much I stink at this. But I'm determined to start looking for that coding job in 3 months... I'm excited and freaked out!
Link to work: Oppia Issue | New Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tech interview practice and tiny game
Thoughts: Started in earnest on the tech interview practice. I am SOOO frustrated! I feel stupid! It's not fun. On a positive note, I seem to have solved a niggling issue in my Supply Run infinite runner game.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tech interview practice and tiny game
Thoughts: The Interview Cake flow is really good. Just as I was feeling frustrated, he sent an email that validates that feeling and encourages you to keep going. Also helps that I'm reading Thinking Fast and Slow and today's chapter was sorta about hacking your mind through system 1. So I got through one problem. Still having issues with my tiny game. I think I need to reorg the code and take it one step at a time. There are too many variables right now.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tech interview practice and tiny game
Thoughts: I was (am) still feeling a bit stupid in terms of algorithms. But I did feel a bit better when I looked up Front-End developer interview questions and realized that the questions I was preparing for were more engineering focused. So I have a new study plan to prepare for front-end dev positions! I still think my algorithm practice needs to improve a TON. So part of my plan will be to stick to the two lower levels of CodeKata for the next couple of weeks. Then struggle back through to my current rank, while also continuing to go through the Interview Cake course, but with more of an eye towards learning instead of trying to solve it. I will say that, in today's practice, I incorporated several of the things I've learned so far in Interview cake about how to think through my solution and optomize for time and space effeciency.
I made several issues for my game to try and get better handle on what I'm trying to fix.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tech interview practice, tiny game, and Oppia accessibility project
Thoughts: Breaking down my game issues has really worked. I've been able to fix enemy spawning issues today. Also did two kata on CodeWars. Previously, I mentioned that my code seemed more verbose. After doing a couple of the problems on Interview Cake, I'm finding myself focusing more on comparing whether or not anyone's answer is more efficient or whether they actually performed a different action, as opposed to making their code shorter or less verbose. I'm heartened to find so far that even though other people's code is shorter (like one line), it doesn't necessarily behave any different or any better.
Last but not least, I finished a bundled PR for the Oppia project for several trivial issues related to accessibility. Hope to get in another PR of bundled fixes tomorrow. I'm the new Accessibility Czarina!
Link to work: Oppia | Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tiny game, and Oppia accessibility project
Thoughts: Didn't do code kata today; I spent the majority of my coding time working on my tiny game. I was able to get through speeding up the game levels over time, which is HUGE, but I noticed that my player falls through the rest of the tile, instead of colliding with the side (like a real wall). Ideally, I'd like to hit the side, but I'm having quite a lot of trouble making that work.
I also fixed some more minor accessibility issues for Oppia but I want to double check before I send in a PR.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tiny game, code kata, and Oppia accessibility project
Thoughts: Really proud of one of the kata I did today. I began with a solution that was O(2n) and whittled it down to O(n)! It was awesome! My tiny game continues to make little strides. But there are still bugs that I'm having trouble squashing. Not sure if I'll be able to ship it by the end of the month. In other news, helping Oppia become more accessible is going well.
Link to work: Oppia | Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tiny game, code kata, and Oppia accessibility project
Thoughts: Two steps forwards, one step back! The tiny game is getting difficult now and I haven't been able to make good progress on new features. It seems like these are fairly mundane game things, but I haven't been able to find answers to my questions, so that stinks. In other news, the kata today were pretty good!
Link to work: Supply Run Game | My Code Wars Profile
Today's Progress: Continuing tiny game
Thoughts: Caught myself up in making some good progress on my tiny game, which meant I neglected other things. Two persistent problems are enemy sprites that glide along the floor and my player constantly moving, imperceptibly forwards and backwards.
MUST FIX!
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing tiny game
Thoughts: Still neglecting Oppia; but I'll get some work done on it this weekend (promise!). I do believe I may have taken a step towards solving my game issues. I removed the places where I set the enemy velocity to 0. This seems to have handled the gliding issue, but I need more testing. Also, perhaps, it may have handled the player movement issue... but, yeah, more testing.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Continuing Oppia
Thoughts: Tiny game is still glitchy. I think it may be time to start over.... Ugh. But I did submit another PR on Oppia for link issues.
Link to work: Supply Run Game | Oppia
Today's Progress: Oppia PR accepted; Hack ID, and tiny game
Thoughts: Went to a great meetup today! Girls Coding Club. While there, I tackled some minor issues with my last Oppia commit and it got merged so I'm that much closer to wrapping up the basic accessibility updates. I also fixed some basic accessibility issues with Hack ID and pushed those live. Filed another issue, as well.
AND, talking through my problem with my tiny game, we isolated it to the jumping. Soooo... I was prepared to take the plunge this evening when I got home to try the other method, where only the player moves. I'd been dreading a complete refactor, but, after actually taking a good look at the methods in the Endless Runner book, I was able to successfully switch to the new methodology with a few relatively simple changes. The biggest hurdle I had to jump (pun intended?) was to figure out how to get my platforms to continue generating, now that the world bounds were no longer the measure. I ended up altering that check in update to check whether or not the last tile in a platform was in camera view. Then I updated the createPlatform method to create the next platform with separation based on the current platform's rightmost pixel (don't worry, I commented the code so I should be able to remember). Anyway, there are still a few new bugs, but it seems to be working much more smoothly!
Link to work: Supply Run Game | Oppia | Hack ID
Today's Progress: Tiny game
Thoughts: Great big strides on my game today. I'm nearly done with it! Still not sure I'll get it out before the end of the month, but it's looking really good! Today I created a menu and new game over screen and made some UI changes using the elements from the same graphics pack the other assets are from. I also update my background to be parallax.
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Tiny game draft finished
Thoughts: I really, really wanted the tiny game to be published this month and, though there are still some teeny, tiny things that could be smoothed out, the game is feature complete and I'm shipping today!!!
Link to work: Supply Run Game
Today's Progress: Start a new tiny game and kinda begin next Oppia issue
Thoughts: I got super inspired by this simple game I love from McFunkyPants, Fantasy Strategy Map game, so I decided to try and take that on with a twist. Also created a new branch to deal with the next batch of Oppia accessibility fixes but I didn't start on it yet.
Link to work: Capture the Court
Today's Progress: Work on Oppia accessibility
Thoughts: I spent most of my work time today working on the final accessibility issue in the audit (Still some other, separate issues outstanding, but this would be the last of the smaller issues) around tab focusing. Interestingly, as I started trying to navigate the site with just the keyboard, I ran into quite a lot of elements that weren't in the tab order (tabindex="0" helps with that) and some other related issues around opening dropdown menus with a keypress, which may be more complex than they first appear.
I also ran into some trouble with trying to randomly generate a map for my Capture the Court game. I'm considering just drawing a single map and focusing on the game play... It might be a good idea to make the game even more tiny. Link to work: Haven't even commited yet ;)
Today's Progress: Reviewing Accessibility Issue
Thoughts: Not much work today, I admit. I had a chat with the owner of an ID/elearning dev company about doing some contract work with them in the future. He suggested that I learn ReactJS and Unity which they use for their projects. I'm a little conflicted on just abandoning Phaser for Unity... I'm thinking maybe I can finish my current project and then do the next one in Unity? I'm also seriously investigating going my own brand of nuclear and going part time on my job to delve further into freelance. Lots of things to think about! Link to work: Haven't even commited yet ;)
Today's Progress: Tackling Oppia Accessibility
Thoughts: I did quite a lot of work on the Oppia Accesibility issue. In this commit, I focused a lot on focus styles and tab order to make it easier to navigate the learner-focused pages via keyboard.
Also resigned my job. You know, no big deal... (NOT!) Link to work: N/A
Today's Progress: Tackling Oppia Accessibility
Thoughts: I kept working on my tab focus issues. This time, I tacked some issues on creating an alt attribute for the user profile avatar, and I noticed several other issues with keyboard accessibility in the exploration in particular, as well as with dropdown menus. I got to thinking that these may be in the realm of the advanced accessibility check I was going to start, so I just created some other issues for them. Submitted a PR on my work so far. Link to work: Oppia PR
Today's Progress: Tackling Oppia Accessibility
Thoughts: Had a good little meeting with my Oppia/Programming mentor, so I spent some time looking at projects I'll be helping with for Google Summer of Code. He also talked to me about how to make my issues better so people could immediately start work. It was all super good stuff. Link to work: Was refactoring issues to be more user-friendly
Today's Progress: Building a Twitter Bot
Thoughts: Building a bot is something I've wanted to play around with for a while and FCC had a nice tutorial on how to build a Twitter bot with Node JS. I know tutorials aren't meant to count, but I spent a considerable amount of time figuring out how to add a new feature where my bot will tweet out project ideas to anyone who tweets at it. Link to work: Go LX Design Something Repo
Today's Progress: Building a Twitter Bot and Oppia Fixes
Thoughts: I did very few Oppia fixes today. Mostly I was just confused by the feedback so I asked for clarification. I finished the second bit of the Twitter bot and after much consternation (realizing that I had put my Twitter developer keys out there!!!) I deleted my original github repo and started over. Which meant that I had to retackle an issue where a folder was showing up as a submodule in my repo.
I'm ignorant of submodules. My understanding is that their main advantage is being able to point to another repo and get the updates, in cases where you are using code from that repo, without your having to duplicate fixes every time. This makes sense but it freaked me out a little, so I had to figure out how to undo this. I used suggestion 1 of the first answer in this StackOverflow question.
But now it keeps crashing. Link to work: Go LX Design Something Repo
Today's Progress: Fixing the Twitter Bot that Jack Build
Thoughts: I kept fiddling and fiddling, determined to make this thing work. And I figured out that I needed to change the procfile and then enable different dynos. More on exactly what I did will come in a post next Tuesday. So everything seems to be working great!
Link to work: Go LX Design Something Repo
Today's Progress: Back to the game drawing board
Thoughts: I realized that the game I was trying to build was a bit too advanced for me as yet, plus I didn't have a good, solid idea of what I wanted the game play to look like. So I decided to take it back a few steps. I spent some time updating the game repo's ReadMe with more ideas. Right now, I'm looking at a Twine RPG, that I can maybe turn into a Phaser RPG at some point. It's been really tough for me to finish narrative based games, but if I think about this as an RPG and less about story, I might be able to get 'er done.
Also, in Twitter bot land, I updated the search queries to include seriousgames so as to broaden my search.
Link to work: Capture the Court Repo
Today's Progress: Working on my second job
Thoughts: I had a chat with my contract team and I'm slated to do a big presentation on instructional design on Monday. I opted to go with a new presentation deck I saw, the web-based Webslides. I began by sketching out the first several slides, after which I got into a good flow. It was mostly html and CSS, though I also included a jQuery plugin to help me zoom and pan around a big mindmap image. I'm really happy with the end result.
Link to work: My Preso
Today's Progress: MOAR Oppia Accessibility
Thoughts: This basic accessibility thing is one of those projects that seems like it should be simple, but once you start testing it, it isn't. But, I also think I'm moving into advanced accessibility territory as I'm discovering little issues with navigating the learner-facing pages with the keyboard. Fortunately, the issues aren't super hard, it's just that it's a bit like playing whack-a-mole. The more issues I solve, the more issues pop up as I continue to test the keyboard nav. In the end, it's a good thing because we're rooting up important issues, but it's a bit exhausting.
I also went to an FCC meetup in the morning, which I, unfortunately, did not enjoy at all. It was too noisy and there was too much talking and I couldn't get any work done. After that, I felt pretty drained, so I ended up skipping the meetup I actually did want to go to, which was later in the day. I went out for lunch and shopping with my mum instead, which was very nice. Sometimes, I do get the feeling that I work too hard... Not sure if I'll be trying the FCC meetup again.
Link to work: Oppia PR
Today's Progress: MOAR Oppia Accessibility
Thoughts: Am I cheating? I don't know. It's been a crazy couple of days, trying to finish out tasks for my final days as an wage earner. I am freaking out a bit, but I think I'll be fine.
Finally finished up my basic accessibility tasks. My next step is actually to take a course on accessibility from Egghead.io, which I'm hoping will help me to better understand how to test with Voice Over, because right now, I'm feeling very lost... which I guess is the point. If the website isn't accessible, not being able to see the screen makes it difficult to navigate.
Link to work: Oppia PR
Today's Progress: Random Stuff
Thoughts: Added a couple of resources to Hack ID. Also took part of that accessibility course I mentioned last update to teach me how to actually use VoiceOver. So that should be helpful. And now, as much as I really like my Capture the Court idea, I find myself struggling with it, I think because it's writing now. Part of me is telling myself to struggle through it because I think it can be a good game; but part of me is saying to scrap it for now.
Link to work: Hack ID