I just finished week 12 of my coding program, so I am officially halfway done. I’ve had a lot of emotions from crying, pulling my hair out frustration to elation that something finally actually works. I’ve been mostly totally overwhelmed sprinkled with fleeting moments of hey, I think I can actually do this. I have the added challenge/benefit of taking the class remotely, so it’s not as easy to ask for help. Although rolling out of bed on Saturday morning to take a four-hour class has to be easier than actually showing up to a classroom for 24 straight weeks.
Everyone warns you going in that a coding bootcamp will be really intense. I was worried that I wouldn’t have time for much else. And while that’s definitely true, I have made time to keep doing things (read: dance obsessively) to keep myself sane. And if taking seven years to get a four-year degree in chemistry has taught me anything, it’s that I’m nothing if not persistent.
Two weeks ago the class was assigned our first group project. It was pretty free-form, we were required to use specific languages and two APIs. What are APIs? Great question, I still don’t really know. What I do know is that it stands for Application Programming Interface. It is the part of the server (internet) that receives and gives information. So when I’m writing code, and I want to get or send something to the internet, I use a specific API for specific information.
I am a frivolous person, so I chose to ask the internet for pictures of dogs and cats in my code. The idea was that the user would choose between two pictures of an animal, deciding which they liked better. What I did for the group project was mostly get the correct images to show up on the screen, based on whether the user wants to see cats, dogs or both. Someone else in my group wrote the code to send the image to “session storage,” a mini database that is a part of every website so that the selected images will show up in a gallery page.
We had done something similar in class and had used the exact same API so I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. It was hard. Everything took at least three times longer than I thought it would. The project was also due three days earlier than I thought it was. Lot’s of last minute changes, frantic fixes, and overall poor planning lead to everything my college nightmares were made of. But I went into presentation day thinking it’s ok, it’s the first project, probably everyone else will have a half-baked Frankenstein looking project as we learn how to code and how to code with other people.
Once again, I was wrong. So many groups had a professional grade, useful, needed website applications such as tracking cryptocurrency prices or current weather conditions with great design and attention to detail. It turns out, I am still a B average student.
And yet, so very persistent. After presentations, I spend my non-existent free time for the past two weeks making the project better and closer to my original idea. I scrapped almost everything I did for the group project so that only dogs show up. I like cats but I’m allergic and the API was harder to use. I made it so a new set of images shows up everytime the user selects an image, and the option to reload with new images, and the ability to delete unwanted photos from the gallery.
I ended up really happy with the functionality and look of the website. If I do anything with it in the future I would create a login (yet another apparently simple task that is really not) and change the images from being saved in session storage to local storage, so that they could be view when the user logs in instead of being erased when the page is closed. I would also really like to reformat the images to be a consistent size. This is hard to do, the width is consistent but if you start hard-coding the height images get distorted.
It’s really not much, a joke website application, but considering 10 weeks before I started I had never written a single line of code in my life, and now have made a functional website, I feel hesitantly ready to take on the second half of the course.
Check out the website itself and all the pictures of dogs you can handle here.
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