Forem: Sebastian Stüwe

Roadmap vs. multiverse (#4)

Sebastian Stüwe — Fri, 14 May 2021 22:27:06 +0000

Who has not seen one of the famous roadmaps by Kamran Ahmed at roadmap.sh? If you haven't - check it out! Quite interesting. I have one sticking to my wall as well. A roadmap such as this gives you a clear idea where to turn next, what to learn and what to skip. Great, isn't it?

I'd like to compare the use of a roadmap with my current mental state and behaviour. Sure, I have started with a roadmap, or at least at a signboard saying "go there." What followed was a meandering journey along well-worn paths, namely: an introduction at FCC.

Unknown territory

Since then, my impatience has let me step off the beaten tracks and into unknown territory where I have to take care of everything myself. I've avoided the dragons so far, because I am quick to duck. Yet, here, in the wilderness, I find myself actively pursuing not just a single path, but many - the server is not set up properly! - fix it. The database design is flawed. Fix it. The code becomes unmanageable. Fix it. Can't connect to the database? Fix it! Add some security features? Won't happen by itself...

Slower? Faster? More intense? Definitely less boring!

I can't tell you whether my progress will lead to the right target. Right now, I am in a sea of excitement with lots of disturbing creatures around me and can't see the mountains. But I have the feeling that I grasp bits and pieces of the whole and hone problem-solving skills as I must find solutions to progress - there's no backup, no hint, no sample solution available.

The world is connected

Learning HTML. Then CSS. Then SCSS. Then JS. Then ... good, solid brickwork. The strongest buildings stand on strong foundations. I am missing out on that - at least partially. Yet if all you see is bricks you won't admire the whole building. The interconnectedness makes a difference! It's not an isolated world, but a real one.

So I recommend to you: Go out there and learn-as-you-go. Invent problems and then solve them. Write little apps, little functions, little things that are meaningful to you. Keeps you motivated and busy late at night! If you need ideas, let me know - I have more than I can realise.

Stats update

Friday: following a line of functions because I forgot an important parameter at design stage... (6:40)
Saturday: minute UML design as my client requested tons of additional features (1:10)
Sunday: Mothers Day - no coding
Monday: additional UML design for the app I am working on: putting my own advice to good use (2:30)
Tuesday: yet another excuse (yae)
Wednesday: upgraded the db design and learned about passwords! exciting! (2:40)
Thursday: started reimplementing and got pretty far. product needs to be done Saturday evening... (4:20)
Friday: deadline looming... lot's of adjustments and more. Learned about CORS! (10:20)

life total: 288:00 hours
this week: 27:40 hours
new total: 315:40 hours

What about you?

What is your opinion? Is your journey more like one that follows a certain path, or are you stretched across many dimensions gradually progressing along the multiverse? :)

Photo by Ngô Thanh Tùng on Unsplash

Ye who teacheth learneth (#3)

Sebastian Stüwe — Fri, 07 May 2021 10:16:35 +0000

Steady, not fast - this is how I'm moving. Here's the latest update of lessons learnt during my weekly coding hours!

Teach/Help!

If you know yourself and know how to learn, you can achieve great things. But it is not the best way to get to the centre of something. A much better way is to teach! If you have already achieved some slight proficiency, why not help out at one of the many learner sites? Give helpful advice and guide learners to places where they can grow. Some possible ideas:

Help here at dev.to
Help at other learner-sites, e.g. FreeCodeCamp
Plan and conduct a beginners html class for old folks or young people at a local school, community centre, etc.
Ask local middle schools if you could run a web club
Look for a young person to assist with his/her studies
Buddy up! Look for a learning partner and divide the next activities among yourselves. Then explain your part to your buddy (and vice versa). (This is the strategy that pulled Canada out of a dark pit of low-performing school graduates many decades ago.)

Not good enough to assist others?

I don't believe you one bit. It's about the right attitude. Take questions as a challenge - even if you don't know the full answer yet, try to find a solution or contribute. Yes, there are lots of great coders out there. So what. You are you. Go out there and face it!

Real-world projects

I received good advice on dev.to to stop tutorial porn and start with real projects. A good friend of mine asked me to develop a tiny app for him. Yeah! This has kickstarted a lot of learning again. He is operating a small clinic, and he needs an online-booking form that he can view at the clinic and prepare files for the next patients. Have a look at the code and give me your best critical comments!

Stats update

Friday: mainly helping out and learning along; some minor corrections on my card game (3:00)
Saturday: busy with the family - only small steps (1:20)
Sunday: progress and lots of learning! started a real-world-project (6:20)
Monday: chores, chores, chores... css-styling and sketching. (5:40)
Tuesday: life affairs... just a bit of cleanup (1:20)
Wednesday: quite a productive day... lots of DOM manipulation and SQL requests, refreshing old php-memories (10:20)
Thursday: stupid error tracking... makes me wish I had spent more time planning and writing it down! (5:30)

life total: 254:30 hours
this week: 33:30 hours
new total: 288:00 hours

What about you?

Are you still doing exercises and coding riddles, or are you already helping out? If not, where could you start? Share your experiences!

Photo by heylagostechie Unsplash

Water down the mill (#2)

Sebastian Stüwe — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 20:56:07 +0000

Water is amazing, isn't it? I am a hobby gardener and I love ag-tech, so naturally I love water. Last week, things were going fairly well - I felt driven by motivation, like water down the mill! I learned about the model-view-controller pattern and applied it to a learning program (which does nothing but illustrate its use! ;) and then to a card game I am developing using JavaScript. I continued to help out on FCC and repotted lots of plants, also laid a brick terrace in my garden.

Daily summaries:

Friday: fail, step back, understand, restart (5:50h)
Saturday: dive into mvc design, help out on FCC (4:30h)
Sunday: completed mvc-test and designed and half-implemented mvc pattern for card game (9:30h)
Monday: tracing errors, and thinking! (2:00)
Tuesday: working prototype! (4:20)
Wednesday: problems again... (3:40)
Thursday: flash! prototype working again (1:50)

last week's total: 223 hours
this week: 31:30 hours
new total: 254:30 hours

Fire is good, coolness is better.

I have spent about 25h on the first version of my card game without achieving anything substantial, and worst of all creating chaos-code that became increasingly harder to maintain. I failed. So I stepped back and restructured my approach and started over. After 4h I had reached the same functionality I had in version 1 after 25h - and a code base that was much cleaner and easier to maintain. What do I make of it? Plan thoroughly before coding!

And your week?

Was your river running freely or obscured by obstacles? What did you do to overcome them? What is your latest discovery, core insight, new thought you discovered last week?

photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on unsplash.

Should M-V-C not actually be M-D-V-C?

Sebastian Stüwe — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 15:35:34 +0000

I recently took first steps using the MVC pattern. While coding along, I was reflecting on the idea of separation of concerns, which made sense to me and turned out to be really helpful in my coding.

Nonetheless, I was asking myself a few practical questions:

Would you consider it bad style if the controller accessed information directly in the model instead of using a get/set method?

class Model {
  data = data;
}

class Controller {
  doSomeControlling = function() {
    model.data += 9;
  }
}

const model = new Model();
const controller = new Controller();

Assuming my model is obtained from who-knows-where (e.g. a database), should I include a fourth element dataHandler between model and controller? I am thinking about ensuring that if the database changes, etc., I still have the possibility to retain my model. Or should I rather implement model-get/set-methods that handle exactly this?

class Model {
  data = ...;
}

class DataHandler {
  getDataFromADatabase = function() {
    // lots of database connection stuff
    return data;
  }
}

class Controller {
  setData = function() {
    model.data = dataHandler.getDataFromADatabase();
  }
}

Further questions about structure unrelated to the heading

Does it make any sense to implement e.g. a controller as a class, when you are anyways going to instantiate it right away, and only once? (see last two lines of first code sample above)
How extreme should you be with methods? I can find a method for lots of small bits that might make the higher-level-function a lot easier to read, but adds lots of methods which would more or less only be used once. Or in other words: When is enough enough? :)

Thank you for your thoughts!

Photo by Mihai Strompl on Unsplash

Order vs. chaos or: plan, and then some more!

Sebastian Stüwe — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 11:33:17 +0000

I received good advice to transition to my own project ideas once I got the basics of a language. Excellent idea. I remembered a friend of mine once - many years back - recommending that simple card games (like Uno) are a good practice problem.

Where I live, we have a game called Mau Mau, which is basically like Uno, just with normal cards. If you play a 7, the next person draws 2 cards, unless s/he has a 7 as well - then the following person draws 4 cards. A jack allows you to wish for a colour. Other than that, you have to say "Mau" when you're down to 1 card, and you need to follow colour or value when playing. Like Uno, as I said.

Boiled spaghettis taste good but are your enemy when on screen

I started, full of energy. Gave it a good 30 hours. And ended with boiled spaghettis. Code I could no longer maintain unless diving a full hour into it. Functions here and there, variables for what again? And then functions fixing functions fixing problems. Variables copied to another scope because that one function handling this important thing wouldn't have access to it - or so I thought. I had to dump it all.

Lasagne is better

I stepped back, admitted my failure and started to think properly (so I thought!). Laid out a solid structure, worked out a practice problem where I would experiment with my design in a simple environment (yes - it worked well, I now have a website that highlights single entries of a list when you click a corresponding button.) Then started to work on my game again. Surprisingly, in less than 4 hours I had achieved the same level of functionality as before, only with much cleaner code and a perspective to continue.

Set your ingredients aside before you cook

Well, I'd done my planning, but only halfway. undefined this, undefined that. I've been chasing these undefineds until I realised that I had forgotten another planning step. Concerning one particular object (the card that is played), some functions would use the card itself, others a unique id as a parameter. This over-complicated matters and led to confusion - was this the function with the id or with the object? It also led me on the wrong path - I thought my problem was scope-related, when indeed it was just sloppyness on my part!

I stepped back again and thought about the inner communication between my classes. 30min later, my problems were gone.

What about you?

Have you been organised and well-structured from the beginning of your coding? Do you remember a moment of clarity? Do you have a good advice for me? Love to hear from you!

Photo by Paul Bergmeir on Unsplash

10,000 hours...?

Sebastian Stüwe — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 21:28:45 +0000

How long to reach somewhere substantial?

Malcolm Gladwell (and other writers, some of them with scholarly aptitude) estimate that 10,000 hours of learning puts you on par with true masters in most, if not all fields. Talent may be important, too - especially when it comes to the last 1%. I'd say, previous experience helps as well.

The implicit question

I assume that only very few jobs require full mastery of coding concepts and related subjects. Yet, I have no idea how many honest hours of work are required to reach to a solid entry level.

The idea

This is a social experiment with n=1. As such, it is hardly any proof, but might give some guiding clues as to what efforts are required. I am going to keep track of all my activities and time spent becoming a coder. Until I give up or survive on my projects!

The challenge

My time stretches between family, work, garden and learning. I wouldn't wanna miss out on most if not all - so understanding how much time I spend on learning can quickly become fuzzy and - in hindsight - not very useful to know and tell. I'll try to recap my learning time and list it here on a weekly basis, to get a better understanding of the idea of "developer in a year". I (re-)started coding on March 31, 2021. Never thought about publishing anything, so the first 25 days are lost to oblivion - what I am estimating here is from memory and based on my calendar.

Backlog #1-#25

Enrolled in a commercial self-paced JavaScript course - so far I've done about 40% of the contents which cover: basics, arrays, objects, DOM manipulation. 30 hours
I had done some HTML about 20 years back, but never pursued that path in my life. 120 hours
I went through FreeCodeCamp's web designer course (HTML + CSS), although I did this last year while I was unemployed for a month and I don't remember much of it. I estimate that I spent about 30 hours on it, as I do remember designing some graphics to make the project sites look nicer. 30 hours
I've read half of "clean code" and I understood about 95% so far!! 5 hours
I realised that I had a git-account which was totally unused, so I started using git (and learning the basics). 2 hours
I have helped a few people on freecodecamp with challenges they faced. 6 hours
I have started programming a simple card game as a learning project. It's not working yet, but I'll get there! 30 hours

Total time spent on learning: 223 hours

Where do I stand today?

I am fairly confident in understanding the language of JavaScript, HTML and CSS, although I have not spent much time understanding patterns. It is just today that I've begun to look into concepts, such as block scope, IIFE, MVC and the like.

What about you?

How many hours would you say are required to become employable? How far are you down the road? How do you overcome hills and mountains?

Keep up! All the best,
Sebastian.