Its been a month since I last posted. A lot of stuff has happened in that time. I went on a 6-week hiatus from Lambda School, so I could work on some projects and also bone up on JavaScript and React. I’ve been working through Brad Traversy‘s JS and React courses from Udemy. I posted some of the JS stuff as I was going through it already – mostly to compare it with the curriculum at Lambda. So far, I’ve found it to be an excellent compliment to Lambda’s material. On its own, its less comprehensive with regard to theory and explanation, but as a source of projects and an additional perspective on JavaScript, its been very helpful to me.

• Modern JavaScript From The Beginning: Section 2 – JavaScript Language Fundamentals (1 of 3)
• Modern JavaScript From The Beginning: Section 2 – JavaScript Language Fundamentals (2 of 3)
• Modern JavaScript From The Beginning: Section 2 – JavaScript Language Fundamentals (3 of 3)

I switched part-through and started working on the React course, because I’m a bit more excited by React (although I completely understand and agree with the advice I read everywhere about getting a solid foundation in vanilla JavaScript). Its also been very helpful – moreso, to me, that the JavaScript one has been so far. At Lambda, we started learning React using Hooks, which can now use state. Then, we learned about Class Components. With Traversy’s course, we started with Class Components and then refactored our code to use Hooks. Doing that really helped me to see the differences between the two. I need to drill it a lot more, so that I know it cold, but the approach and the direct contrast by refactoring a project was illuminating. There were some other very useful tidbits, like adding some VS Code extensions that Traversy uses, which I’ve found helpful, but I’ll get into that later, when I eventually blog about the course.

• Udemy: React Front to Back

California

In early December last year, my wife applied for a library director position at CalArts, in Santa Clarita. They flew her out for a 2-day interview with the administration and staff, including a presentation and some other things. After the holiday break, they followed up with phone interviews, I think it might have been from the provost and then the president of the university. To make a long story short – she applied on a lark, thinking that even if she doesn’t get the job, its good practice, and she ended up landing the position. We accepted in February. She let the administration and her staff at Lehman College, in the Bronx know, earlier this month, and she’s slated to start in the beginning of July.

Its a big move for us – we’ve visited California a few times to see my sister when she lived in different parts of the state. Now, we’re looking at moving there, with 2 kids. Last week, she and I took a flight out there, during our older daughter’s winter break, and met with agents who the school hired to help us with the relocation. We stayed at my sister’s place, about an hour and a half away, and toured Santa Clarita with the agent and a realtor. We looked at houses, apartments, gated communities, schools and (of course) the food in the area. Most of the schools are “blue ribbon,” which means that they’re performing above the state average. The ones we were most interested in, naturally, were the ones rated highly by the state – so on a scale of 1-10, anything 8+. There are quite a few of them in the area.

The system is different from here in Yonkers, NY. Here, if you live in a city and move to another, you’re pushed to the new city’s school district. Schools can get filled up quickly, so your kids don’t necessarily end up in a nearby school – the one our daughter goes to, for example, is about a 15-minute drive from us, but she had to actually test in to attend it. In Santa Clarita, the city in which you reside (they’re actually more like small towns to me) determines what school you go to, but if you move to another city in Santa Clarita, your kids can elect to remain at their school – and other kids in the family are grandfathered in. I like it. It gives us the flexibility to rent somewhere for some time (we’re thinking a year or two) with a well-rated school, and then look for somewhere affordable to live. We don’t need to worry about changing schools midway through and disrupting our daughters’ lives with settling into a whole new school environment.

The city setup and amenities are very different from NY as well. The architect who planned the city there built them as small, interlinked communities. Each school is built alongside a large park/playground. The towns are connected to each other by paseos, which are trails and small bridges that link them together. Its possible for families to walk these and never have to deal with motor traffic. They’re patrolled by police, as well. Its a lot more outdoorsy than I’ve been for years. Its also a lot more sleepy than I’m used to, living 15 mins from NYC. There’s no night-life (people online all basically say, for night-life, drive to LA). Stores close early (to me). I don’t know if they have 24-hour diners. There’s only one hospital for the entire region – in Yonkers, alone, we have 3 hospitals, and we’re a stone’s throw from a number of others all over Westchester and the Bronx and Manhattan.

Food

Food also looks a bit different there. Its diverse, but with a different set of ethnicities than here. We both have Chinese, Japanese and Korean food, but their’s seems to be a bit fresher (I haven’t seen greasy Chinese food, like we get here, over there). Their Thai was better than ours. They have a lot of Filipino food, we have to go to Queens or NJ for a lot of that, with only 1-2 spots in Westchester, Rockland and Manhattan available otherwise. I haven’t seen anything like Malaysian or Indonesian there. I did see a few Vietnamese spots, but we have more. There was some Indian food, but we have a ton more, both in the NYC area and outside of it. They also have no West Indian food at all. So far, in the US, I’ve really only seen West Indian food (Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam) in NY and Florida – there’s sometimes Jamaican food elsewhere, but its focus isn’t really the same, even though its geographically similar.

We have a lot of Dominican and Puerto Rican spots here, but CA is dominated by Mexican food. Their Mexican food is also different from ours. One of my friends who lives in CA, and who we visited 2 years ago when we saw my sister, said that CA Mexican food is really its own thing – its distinct from traditional Mexican food, Tex-Mex and other regional variations. I think there were some Peruvian spots there, but I’m used to seeing a bit more Peruvian and Ecuadorian places by us as well. I don’t remember seeing any African or Middle-Eastern fare at all, and we have those both in the City’s vicinity as well as outside of it. I also don’t remember seeing Greek or Mediterranean or East European food there, but its entirely possible that its pocketed in places I haven’t been through yet. The same for Jewish food – NY has Jewish delis all over.

Before I forget to say it – sushi burritos are genius!

Projects

Getting back to programming, I updated my portfolio with React. I need to add some things to it, of course, like a contact form, additional projects and I want to make some changes to the mobile view, but I’m mostly happy with it so far. I added a WordPress section and included my blogs as well as the website I’m building for Breast Cancer Comfort.

• Portfolio v3

Regarding Breast Cancer Comfort, they expanded with a few new people, and the new COO asked that I build the site using WordPress with a theme/builder called Divi. I’ve been reproducing the site I hand-coded with Divi and its coming along, but I’ve found that I really prefer coding websites to using tools like Divi now. Divi is useful for people with no coding experience, although it has a learning curve, itself. Its just much faster for me to actually write CSS than it is to tinker with Divi settings to try and match what I can do by hand in 1-2 lines of code. A lot of this has to do with positioning and resizing, and with layout. Flexbox and CSS Grid let me do a lot. Nesting containers in Divi is much more of a chore, and the biggest timesink is that I can’t use the interface to natively select elements by class or type. Every style change I make is essentially independent, and I have to duplicate it by hand. I’m sure there’s a way to use custom CSS to remedy this (or at least I strongly think that there should be) but I haven’t learned it yet.

• Breast Cancer Comfort (WP/Divi)

The Kiddo’s Blog

Finally, my older daughter (she’s 7 now) started a coding blog, about 2 weeks ago. I walked her through setting up a site on WordPress, and she did it. I helped her edit it, initially, with choosing a theme that she liked and then removing some default elements and posts, but by the end, she had gone to Google and found images she wanted to use, learned a little bit of how to edit them with the old copy of Photoshop that I’m still running on my desktop, learned some of how to upload images and navigate the file system in Windows (she knows a little of that already from other stuff she’s done) and over the weekend, when I got back from Cali, she wrote her first post as well. We made the site live 3 days ago, so she’s excited. She started a coding group at her school that she calls The Coding Scouts and tries to teach her friends about Scratch (and I think, Python) on Wednesdays. So, this is my first shout-out to it, and to her efforts, on this blog. I’ll share it on FB when she has some more content.

• The Coding Kid

Oh, and wifey’s birthday was on Monday! Its her late day at work, so she got home at almost 10pm. Yay, adulting!