Has coding ever made you so mad you wanted to throw your laptop out a window? Has coding ever made you cry? Don’t be ashamed and don’t quit! Realize that your confusion is a temporary state.
My second Flatiron School project was to build a very basic web app; I called it Sandwich Platter. Users can sign up or login to see sandwich recipes. In keeping with the ActiveRecord CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) project requirements, you can only Create, Update or Delete your own sandwiches; you can Read all of the sandwich recipes.
As I approached my first Flatiron project, I realized I should pick a website I enjoy, since I’d be spending a week with it, scraping data and presenting it to the user in a friendly interface. The successful examples provided by my instructors and the Learn.co platform included “best of” lists such as favorite cake recipes, world’s best restaurants, top 25 video games, etc. Another category of examples were apps where you enter your zip code and receive relevant information, such as movies or meetups near you. Finally, two levels of scraping were required on this project: first the user gets the list, and then they have to be able to choose any item on the list and drill down to the details. For example, they should be able to get the ingredients and the directions for a recipe, or a plot summary and the stars of a movie.
I chose to scrape a list of rail trails on Traillink.com. Many abandoned railroad lines have been changed into recreational trails for bicycling, walking, horseback riding, snowmobiling, etc. In my RailTrails app, you enter your zip code and get a list of trails near you. Then you choose one of the trails on the list to see more details: length in miles, state(s) where it’s located, surface (gravel, paved, etc.), endpoints, and a full description of the trail. There were tricky things I couldn’t include in my first project, such as a clickable map showing all the trails.
My first hurdle was the blank canvas problem: where do I begin? I carefully watched an example video and put my project into that format, learning as I typed. Of course, it didn’t really apply to my project, so I wiped it out and started over. Then I carefully put my project into the code I wrote for the student scraper lesson on Learn.co, again learning as I typed. That didn’t apply, either! But reproducing these two projects through my fingers and really working with them and handling the file setup helped a lot. Finally, I began to understand how to get my project to work.
The final hurdle was the details. Depending on the zip code, anywhere from five to nearly 100 trails might show up. I didn’t want to load all of the details for all of those trails; I thought it was needless and would slow down my program. I only needed to serve up the details on the one trail chosen by the user. Where to put that data: in every single trail object, or into an array, or a hash, or what? A fellow student came to the rescue, explaining that I could add the detail attributes to the trail object and only return those details for the selected trail. It worked! Happy Trails!
In March 2012 I saw Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel sing in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera. I hadn’t seen much opera before, but Terfel was so funny, his Italian diction so perfect, and his ability to communicate music and art so direct, that it changed me. I became an opera fan. I auditioned for and was accepted to the 80-voice Ars Musica Chorale and a whole new universe of creative people. I started taking voice lessons, sang my first solo at a student recital, and joined the board of the Chorale.
I already knew French and Italian fairly well, but since starting that I’ve learned to sing in German, Latin, Hebrew, and even Church Slavonic. I memorized the Welsh national anthem in Welsh so I could sing it on the national holiday in Wales, where I met Terfel himself. Meanwhile, at work in the telecom construction industry, I became the go-to person for all sorts of software and database challenges in my office. In QuickBase, Excel and other programs, I created tables, dashboards, workflows, page views, formula fields, reports, links, and buttons, increasing overall productivity while I continued to manage project schedules.
I was laid off from my employer after nine years of excellent reviews. Since the hiring of a web developer put me out of a job, I thought, “let’s get on the other side of that equation, where the growth is.” I’ve always enjoyed working with a variety of people, from engineers and technicians to artists and writers. Now is the time for me to integrate my whole self into my job, combining my love for technology, communication, process improvement, languages, teamwork and art into a new career.