Santa is Scary

Part of building a family is forming traditions, especially over the holidays. Unfortunately, some end up being better than others. Last year was our first Christmas with our daughter, so we started up a couple of traditions, hoping to continue them for years to come. One of these has been great; we go down to the mall and have her pick out an ornament and then get it personalized by a calligrapher. This is something my grandparents did for me and I still treasure those ornaments. They go up on the tree every year. Last year, we took Kaija to see Santa at the mall, and it went perfectly fine. We ended up getting a great picture of her with a sly smirk on her face; it was hilarious. This year, we decided to do it again. As soon as we passed her over to Santa, she freaked. She didn't want any part of it all. We paid way too much for a bunch of pictures of her completely bawling with Santa. While it was still kind of funny, I don't think we'll continue with this tradition. I think she's just at the age where she doesn't trust complete strangers, but in the end, I think we would be better off getting a professional photograph of her in a nice Christmas dress.

I didn't have any CS Prep class today, so I worked on Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New JavaScript Bootcamp. I'm finally about 75% done with this 52 hour course, and have reached what seems to be the final project. We've moved from working specifically in the front end with JavaScript to working with NodeJS on the back end. We created a couple of tools to use in the command line that are really cool. The first does the same thing as "ls" on the command line, listing out all of the contents of any directory, but also allows you to customize the colors of directories and files to distinguish between the two with the use of the Chalk library. This was a really simple, but cool, project, only spanning about 30 lines of code. The next project we did was similar to Nodemon, which just keeps Node running and automatically updates on a save of the file or files being looked at. It does exactly the same thing as Nodemon, and does it in less than 50 lines of code. We made use of a couple of different libraries with this project and a bunch of stuff baked into Node. It's always really cool to learn more about Node, but I keep realizing there is a whole lot to learn in this area.

The final project spans what looks like about 10 hours of coursework, and builds up an e-commerce site from scratch. So far, we've started to build up the express server and hooked up a sign up form so that it posts the data to the server. We used body parser to turn that data into an object so it's easier to iterate over. There's a lot left to do in this project, and I think it's going to be a great learning experience. Tomorrow, we have our last class of Codesmith's CS Prep, other than a short presentation on Monday that shouldn't take that long. We're going to start off the day tomorrow going over closure, which again could be a topic you spend days or weeks learning. It's incredibly tough to fully grasp, but like most concepts in this course, I believe it's meant to give you a taste of the concept, but the work must be done on your own to take it to the finish line. While I've taken Will's course that covered closure and feel like I know it better than most, I still feel like I have a lot left to understand, like most things in JavaScript. I keep getting the feeling like I'll never fully understand JavaScript and there are so many things I struggle with. However, if I look back to a few months ago, the amount I know now over then is crazy. I suspect I'll have the same realization 3 months from now, but will still feel there is so much to learn.

Until tomorrow!