I’ve been posting less frequently than I want to for the past few months. As related from previous posts, there’s a lot going on, with the move to California, my hiatus from Lambda being over, Coronavirus rearing its head (we’re right by the NY epicenter in New Rochelle, which is like a 5-min drive from here) and generally managing the kids. I need to get back to posting about Lambda School. For some reason, I have a block with writing the Components II post that I need to finish before I can move onto React, where I’ve been focusing most of my time recently. I’m going to get that done before March is over.

Anniversary

Anyway, March 18th was our anniversary. My wife and I have been together for 20 years now, with 10 of them being married. We’re old news. I shared it in the Mental Health channel on Lambda’s Slack, because we’re usually writing more about doom and gloom there, and I wanted to help populate it with a spot of light here and there.

Due to Coronavirus, we didn’t go out to celebrate. We basically remained home, sequestered with the kids, and worked on cleaning the house, prepping for CA and I worked on React projects. On the plus side, this really raises the chances that our 30th anniversary will be more exciting.

Kiddos

The older one’s school is closed until the end of March, due to Coronavirus. At the end of the month, they’ll reassess to see if it will be closed further. I expect that it will, because the virus isn’t going to just recede, especially in a populous area like where we live. The older one’s classes are now online, so she’s happy. She enjoys using the computer and this gives her an excuse from school to basically emulate me and sit for hours staring at a screen.

Its been rough though. Working on Lambda is hard to balance with regular work and managing the kids. They interrupt a lot. A lot. Its frustrating to be deep into trying to understand a project or a new concept and then have my focus shattered because the kids are fighting with each other or the older one has quietly switched to YouTube and is now shouting about a Roblox or Minecraft video. I’m not so young anymore, so when I lose my concentration, I have to restart, and its time-consuming. Some of it has gotten better, just in the last week. I’m finally beginning to really understand the basics of React, so there are things I can pick right back up with, even after being pulled away for World War III: Junior Edition and having to impost martial law on the kiddos and separate them until tempers recede and new peace treaties can be broken.

Lambda Kids

The older one is super-excited. Since I started Lambda, she’s wanted to do the same. She’s always talked about having a “Lambda Kids” school and now, Lambda is actually making that a short-term reality. Last week, they announced that classes are suspended for two weeks (which began this Monday) on account of Coronavirus. They’re offering services for students who are still interested, and cohorts that had a build week (like mine, in WEBPT14) can join an optional build week that starts next week. They recommended that we take the time to rest and tend to our mental health, but I’m using it to catch up with the curriculum and work on projects.

Anyway, one amazing thing that they did was start coding classes for kids. They were originally slated to happen twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, but due to the sheer response they got, they’re running them Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for the next two weeks. Its volunteer-driven, with our instructors leading the classes and conducting them via Zoom. Parents who signed up have to remain close by to the kids, to supervise, and I think the classes are an hour long and will focus on Scratch.

The idea is that parents who are now home with the kids and who are having a hard time managing them, will have an educational activity that they can work on with them, and which helps teach them about coding. I might have been one of the people who mentioned the difficulties balancing the kiddos being at home with activities at Lambda in one or two of the Slack channels…

There are two groups of classes. One is for 6-9-year olds and the other is for 10-12-year olds. My daughter is really excited for it. Brit Hemming, who was my instructor when I started Lambda (I did HTML, CSS and the initial JS stuff with her) is one of the instructors. She’s taught children before and started a channel in Slack about it as well. It’ll be fun if she ends up being both my former instructor and now, my daughter’s.

There were a deluge of applicants, so I think that the classes will be broken into two week-long sessions. We’re in the 2nd week’s run.

Lambda and Coding

Finally, classes started back up for me on March 9th, which was also my mother’s birthday. She’s catching up to dad. He’s 81 and she’s now 78. Back in January, Student Success said that when I started back, WEBPT14 would be starting React. They miscalculated a bit. This cohort already finished unit 1 of React (Intro to React) and were beginning unit 2 (Single-Page Applications) when I started; so I’m essentially two weeks behind.

I didn’t do well with this when I ran it the first time, because there was a lot going on at home (the two weddings, tons of family over, the kids starting school, wife’s work and my own, people getting sick – all of the usual craziness with life). My hope was that I’d go through it all again and come out of the other side with a solid understanding. The path to that has changed somewhat, but I’m still intent on getting there.

Although I’m behind, I’m working on catching up. I didn’t get to do any of the formal assignments for this unit yet. I’ve been working on the Intro to React stuff. I did make an Avengers app with React Router, from unit 2, last week. I also completed the sprint challenge, but not in the allotted time. The first time I tried it, before I flexed to this unit, I got through it all except for creating a working search bar. This time, the same thing happened, but I kept working at it and managed to create the search bar. The only issue is that it wasn’t within the allotted 3-hour timeframe. I have something that works to reference now though, so if I have to retake the sprint challenge, I’ll be able to complete it.

I’ve also been chatting with another student from the Bronx named Allan, who was in WEBPT10 with me and is also now in WEBPT14. He shared a video from Dev Ed with me, which was about React Router. It was a good video. Dev Ed has come up in my YouTube feed a bunch of times but I never watched his videos. I’m a subscriber now. I worked through a video tutorial of his that has us create an application that connects to the Edamam API and download recipe information. It included a search bar. Going through that tutorial helped a lot with my finally completing that part of MVP for the sprint challenge, even though I didn’t do it on time.

I added all three of those recent projects (the sprint challenge, which connects to the Rick and Morty API, the Avengers one which uses React Router but local data, and the recipe one from Dev Ed) to my portfolio.

For the recipe one, I also combined some info from Brad Traversy‘s React course with what Dev Ed was doing – I used environment variables in a .local.env file to store my login info to the Edamam API instead of having them in open sight in one of the files that are viewable at GitHub. It all worked locally, but when I published to Netlify, the API call was failing. I figured out how to make Netlify use the environment variables though, so that info is still protected, but the application can access it to make API calls. I’ll post about it separately, later.

Anyway, I’m going to get that Components II post written in the next few days and also work on React, and finally start writing about it too. I have a ton of things I wanted to share on the blog, but haven’t, because I also want to try and keep most of the material here my own, but I’ve been reading articles and watching videos and have a giant file on Evernote with links I’m going to figure out a way to share, hopefully without them dominating the blog. But, ultimately, if that information is useful for people, that’s more important anyway.