studio zandra

Un-possible?

Looking for a cute set of progress bars for my app, I searched around and found a great blog post with a few examples. Originally I had zero intention of using animated progress bars, but they seemed to fit well enough for my needs and actually added a bit of, dare I say, pizazz, to the page.

So I go to play around with the code… aaand it’s jQuery.

On a positive note, usually I can tell what’s going on in jQuery, as if reading psuedocode. It feels sort of like guessing what a Spanish billboard says as an English speaker (to me, anyway). I suppose the faster way to move forward with my project would have been to just import some jQuery via CDN, but I decided that I wanted to fully understand what was going on, and thus decided to rewrite it in plain JavaScript.

“Mayhaps, in the span since first we met, an AI hath vanquished thee, mighty jQuery,” I said to my screen as I Googled “jQuery to JavaScript converter.”

Surprisingly, there was a tool which actually did something, or enough to get me started. Despite some very strange copy on their page, the WorkVersatile converter did deliver on their promise of only “some errors” after conversion.

The original jQuery:

$(".animated-progress span").each(function () {
$(this).animate(
{
width: $(this).attr("data-progress") + "%",
},
1000
);
$(this).text($(this).attr("data-progress") + "%");
});

… and the invalid JavaScript output:

document.querySelectorAll(".animated-progress span").each(function () {
this.animate(
{
width: this.attr("data-progress") + "%",
},
1000
);
this.innerText = this.attr("data-progress" + "%");
});

My end product; instead of innerText, I used the Django template to fill in the element’s text:

document.querySelectorAll(".animated-progress span").forEach(ele => { 
  
  ele.animate(
  [
    { width: ele.getAttribute("data-progress") + "%", },
  ], 
    {
      duration: 1000,
      fill: "forwards"
    }
  );

});

Pivotal‘s free tier might be just what you need to get started or re-energize your side project.

Combining Pivotal’s project management software with pomofocus.io — those two tabs in my browser have really boosted my output and kept me organized. So far, the free tier of Pivotal Tracker has been enough to get my little project off the ground, so I thought it might be helpful to share.

You create an account and then name your project. Then you can add user stories or features which you eventually plan on adding to your app or site (your product roadmap).

Adding these features is pretty simple, and you can put as much detail as you like.

Working solo, some of the features like “Accept”/”Reject” buttons aren’t really useful (think: pull request meme of awarding oneself a medal). Also, I’m not quite clear on the project velocity calculation, which seems like a powerful feature that I’m not taking full advantage of at the moment (here’s a 2-year-old video explaining the velocity calc feature, or you can actually — shudder — read the docs). Other than that it’s pretty amazing for my needs. And it’s nice to know that I can still have up to 5 users should I need to bring on help.

This sort of freemium app is really enabling a lot of startup and small business innovation, since a lot of side projects don’t generate income at first. I hope to pass it along with a freemium app of my own!

When the phrase, “how long has that been broken?” enters into your vocabulary, it’s probably past time to add tests to your project.

Finally got my tests going with some momentum. I’ve also adjusted the dashboard view a bit over at JobTrek; although I’m lacking time to design a UI, at least it looks a bit better now. (Leave a comment if you think I shouldn’t wait to find another Bootstrap theme.) And dear Lord help me, I’ve bought a domain name and even coughed up the $7 for the Heroku Hobby plan with SSL.

I’d learned some basics in the Kickstart Coding course, but couldn’t get my basic tests to pass. Turns out I’d been adding my tests to the wrong tests.py file, in the wrong app directory. Hopefully this blog post will save some random person out there from making the same mistake!

Another beginner issue for me was testing templates and content for anonymous versus authenticated users — more on that in my next post.

For some good, free content on testing in Django, check out VeryAcademy’s series on YouTube.

The fun-employed phase has lost its luster; I’m not quite at the soy-sauce-over-rice-for-dinner stage, but let’s just say it’s crunch time. Now firing off apps left and right, sending LinkedIn DMs, and contacting recruiters and former co-workers is the daily grind.

In side project news, I’ve abandoned SelfWars and all those Vuetify components. Also, I’m finally digging in to SQL joins (studying via Kickstart Coding,) after avoiding it like the plague for so long.

Lately been building a job search progress bar web app in Django. Fun, fun, fun! Wanna take a sneak peek?

Step 1: register — I know, I know (a user story for anonymous sessions is on my plate)

Step 2: add some jobs you’ve applied to, using the simple form

Step 3: view your interview rate percentage and offer rate percentages on a handy pie chart (more graphs are planned)

See if your interview rate is around at least 15%, and see approximately how long your search will take. Based on lovely research from TalentWorks.

I know I said ‘progress bar,’ but for now it’s in the form of a pie chart; hey, who dun’ like pie?

I realized I was giving all this ‘daily grind’ advice out to Nucamp students, but when folks see in starkly-presented numbers just how long their job search could take at a certain pace, I think it’s got the potential to be an illuminating kick in the pants.

Just back from wonderful travel visiting relatives around Jamaica. It was much-needed refreshment, and my first international trip since Sweden, back in the ‘before times’.

It was great to spend a lot of time with family. I specifically went to see my aged grandma, who is in her 90s but is still sharp as a tack and still going up and down staircases — bodes well for the ‘ol genome. When I complained about carrying some extra pounds, she chided me that I could use a few trips up and down some steps as well. The Greatest Generation rolls like that!

My intrepid hubby rented a car and drove around the island. Everyone, including me, was pretty impressed with his skills — next time I will definitely fly into Montego Bay instead of Kingston, and rent a car.

Perhaps Portland, Jamaica’s potholed roads are a good metaphor for a coding career.

(They are making improvements, but in the meantime here is a hilarious commentary on the lack of repair.) Driving those roads certainly make one question one’s life choices. But then there is a smooth stretch of pavement for a while, and all the struggle and perseverance seems worth it.

I made the really tough decision to leave the role I posted about. The company was great, the people were amazing, the kudos on my progress were good; even React was not as annoying as I’d remembered. It was just one of those weird miscommunications of expectations which sometimes happens, especially when both sides are well-intentioned and perhaps a bit starry-eyed. Once we realized what had occurred, there was some extra work involved for everyone — I personally was pulling unsustainable hours to keep up. Could I have rode out the tough schedule for a year? Likely at the cost of some health and home life, sure. But I think both sides also learned a lot for the better, and ripping off the band-aid salvaged some time and money for all concerned.

Knowing that I can do the job, ‘drinking from the firehose’ of web development and seeing leaps of improvement, is very validating.

So I’m again at a small fork in the road — should I forge ahead with another dev role, or should I take what I’ve learned and revisit the customer support/management-y realm. Before the Jamaica trip I was experiencing a lot of angst about it, but I’ve been reminded that a lot of people dream to have such decisions before them! My gut says to apply for both tracks and see what turns up. I think I shall sleep on it.

I had to decide what features to put in a basic version of the app.

Russell Brand mentioned in his video that he used a scale of 1 – 10 to rate himself in each life area. I decided to start with 1-5 for now and sketched out a rough list of ideas:

Default scale of 1-5, maybe this scale is editable by user later?
Default set of life areas, can be renamed by user later
Be able to save progress and view a bar chart for week/month
How did I do this week? frequency? daily/weekly?
Need an initial default setup after first open of the app, so that there’s some baseline to compare to

I was going to also set different domains or life areas, but maybe that will be v 2.0:

Good spouse – family
Diet – health
Exercise – health
Bedtime – health
Spiritual practice – spirituality

Some sort of “save” button or option, perhaps

“View past” – a way to view a chart over time

Next, to start building, which I’ve already begun, using Vue.

An idea for an app to evaluate myself on a daily basis came to me recently while watching an odd video. (I was a bit bashful about setting this post to public last year, so it’s a bit old now. I might be motivated to revisit this project by blogging.)

It was Russel Brand discussing procrastination on YouTube. (Oh, the irony.)

The user would set the parameters on different scales — how Zandra-y was I on exercise this week on a scale of 1 to 10? Maximum Zandra? 40-year-old, years-ago-Zandra? Or ace Starfleet cadet Zandra level? Was I the best Zandra that I could be today/this week?

I think SelfWars is a good name because it’s a constant battle against one’s self.

So if I drew a few prototype screens, what might they look like? Let’s see in my next post.