Its been a little over a month since I last blogged. Its been hard to find time recently. We made the move from NY to CA and have been living here for about a month now. For the first two weeks, we stayed at my sister’s place in Yorba Linda while we drove out to Santa Clarita to find a place of our own. Eventually, we did land a place, and what makes it funny to me is that it was the first place we looked at. We checked out a bunch of houses for rent, apartments, townhouses, gated communities and the like, and eventually went with the first townhouse that we’d seen because it offered the most space and the company came down on price twice for my wife (it pays to negotiate).
Last week on Monday, we got the keys, and now, the Friday of the following week, we’ve got furniture in all of the rooms except for what will become my office, and we have internet (Spectrum, which I’m leery of because in NY they have a bad reputation – they’re the re-branded Time-Warner and were sued by the city for false advertising and false claims of speeds that aren’t actually supported by the copper wire that they use). They were the only company that offered high speed in our area though – AT&T could only offer 75MB down, while Spectrum claims up to 960MB (we went with the 400MB package, which is enough for us).
Since starting to settle down, we’ve leased a car (a 2020 Hyundai Santa Fe) and made several trips back to my sister’s place to move things from her garage. My wife scored a fantastic deal on a refrigerator, washer and dryer from a family who were moving to a bigger place that already had appliances – $600 for all three! The washer was allegedly only a few weeks old. We had some help moving them to our place (our agent had two of her son’s football-player-sized friends help with the move) and I installed everything. The water lines were fine, but I was a little concerned after setting up the dryer because it uses gas, so we had a plumber come by and give it the once over. He confirmed that I’d done everything properly, but gave me some sealing compound to use to assuage my fears.
The kiddos have settled in, although with Coronavirus in effect, they’re spending a lot of time watching TV and the older one is glued to her tablet. My sister spent the night last week, so we had our first guest, and her husband and his cousin also visited. Its nice to be able to host people, even briefly, in our own place. We’ve been throwing the girls on video-chats with my parents back home in NY pretty frequently, to keep them connected. My brother, his wife and his 10-month-old son have moved into the house there and are also in chat with us – the girls like seeing their little cousin grow. He’s learning to walk now.
We also met some of our neighbors, and so far, they’re a really fun bunch. The ones directly on our side have 3 girls – I think 5, 12 and 17 years old, but I might be wrong. The ones past them have a twins, I think – a boy and a girl who are either 3 or 4. Our kids get along pretty well. The first family are also interesting to me because the husband is close friends with the person who runs the Warped Tour and knows a lot of bands. His wife is a punker and does some kind of technical support from home. He used to work as a manager in the music industry for about 15 years, so he knows a lot of the newer metal and related acts that have toured – people like Shadow’s Fall and that scene. He’s also friends with a lot of the larger punk acts from the mid-90s and on. I think he’s a little older than me, and while he’s not into the heavier stuff I’m into (death, black, grind, etc.) he’s more into 80s metal and, from what I can discern, some light thrash. When I find time, we might all hit shows together.
Lambda
I completed the front-end portion of the Lambda curriculum. When I last posted, it was the day that I was going to take the sprint challenge for it, and I passed. We moved on from there to back-end, starting with Node and Express. So far I like both – and the instructor, Jason Maurer – but I wasn’t able to complete all of the projects due to our move. All of the driving and house-hunting just devoured my time. I was able to attend all of the lectures in that first sprint, but without having worked on the projects, I wasn’t able to complete the sprint challenge.
The following week, and this week, we moved on to Data Persistence, which is largely relational databases. For the first time, I missed the lectures. All of them. And the classes in-between. I had expected something like this to happen, and weeks ago, I had reached out to Student Success to let them know that it might happen. I was hoping to take a hiatus from the program to work on the move and settling in, but I wasn’t able to get approved for a hiatus initially. When they got back to me, I had already started a build week project as the React II/Senior React Developer with a team and didn’t want to abandon them, so I told Student Success that I’d like to break after the build week.
I’ll eventually do a write-up about this build week, but for now, our project was called Sojourn and was based off of the Expat Journal project that Lambda usually offers in its menu of projects. Being the React II person was a completely different experience than React I. I had to rely on both the React I person’s work and the back-end developer’s work and coordinate with them a lot. It was harder with the back-end person, because he’d also just returned from a hiatus and wasn’t yet caught back up.
That didn’t happen, so I struggled through Node/Express and then fell flat with Data Persistence. Student Success did reach out to me, but it was a slow process, and as of two days ago, I’ve been removed from WEBPT14 and will rejoin WEBPT16 on July 6th. I’ll be repeating Advanced Web Applications and build week, which is fine to me, because I’d like to practice those more, and then I’ll move on to Node and the rest after. My concern is that I had wanted a slightly longer period off – I’m getting the week off that the school is giving to everyone, but my wife’s new job starts on July 6th, so I’ll be alone with the kids, which is really difficult when you’re trying to focus on lectures in Zoom.
Currently, when I have class, my wife takes the kids away, to another room or outside. If they’re around, I can’t hear anything. Its really hard to make a 2.5 year-old understand how to be quiet, and if she needs changing or feeding or just general comfort, she makes it known. the 7.5 year-old is also very noisy if she’s not occupied with her tablet or something else. On the west coast, Lambda classes are from 4:30 – 6:30. Back in NY, with the 3-hour difference, they started at 7:30, so my wife was home and able to help. I’m basically assured that I won’t be able to focus on the live lectures from this point forward, so I’ll attend to the best of my ability and then repeat the process by watching the video recordings when they’re released the next day. Its nice to have that option, but I won’t be able to actively participate as much as I generally try to, and I won’t be able to ask the instructor questions during the lectures.
The Student Success person who worked with me basically told me that in order to remain fair to the other students, some of who weren’t given the 2nd hiatus opportunity that I have, he couldn’t push out my start date. I understand that, and don’t want to make any of the other students feel like their voices and concerns haven’t been heard, so I didn’t press the issue, but from what I can tell, he’s about 20 years younger than me and doesn’t seem to have kids, so he likely won’t understand the difficulty in transition. If my sister lived closer, she’d be around to help watch the kids for those 2-3 hours, during lecture, but right now, its not an option. I know other people work through much more trying circumstances than what I’m in, so I’m going to make the best of it – I’ve told people that I marvel at how single parents can manage this stuff.
Side projects
Breast Cancer Comfort is coming along. I haven’t made any major updates to the website, but we’re meeting next week via Zoom, so I’ll see what comes next. I know that we want to build-in a better storefront. Right now, we’re using Etsy, and they’re considering Shopify or another platform. The final decision hasn’t been made though. One of our volunteers, Alaha Nasari, also just won a $20,000 grant and got written up in Newsday. She does some writing for us and is a high school senior. I’m really impressed by her ability and I love that she takes time to work with younger students to help teach them science. I think we’ll link to some of that on the website.
I’ve also started working on a resource for beginning web developers that basically explains some coding concepts and gives code examples. Its based on what I’ve done at Lambda and some outside resources (read: Google) that I’ve used. I’m calling it the Code Conspectus, and I’ve modeled some of its appearance after 1st and 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I haven’t gotten to work on it in some weeks, but I’m going to try to squeeze in time during this little hiatus. Once I’ve completed enough, I’ll share it and then see if anyone else wants to contribute to it – but since its geared towards beginners (like myself) I want to make sure that people keep that in mind when writing.
I also learned some Markdown to work on this project. I really like Markdown so far. Most of my project will be shared pages on GitHub, and Markdown lets me format the files, but more importantly – it lets me include code snippets with highlighting! I had tried some JS libraries for this but wasn’t happy with the results. Markdown proved to be a really simple way to implement pages with text, links, images and code snippets.
Ok. That’s my update for now. If I’m able, I’m going to try to write some more posts here. I’ve read a bunch of things that I really want to share – some are tech-related and some are related to the job hunt and other things. I also want to work on Lambda projects and the Code Conspectus though, so we’ll see how things go over the next week or so. I hope everyone else is having a productive, meaningful and fulfilling run.
REDO FROM START 