Its the end of the year and the start of a new decade. 2020 has been eventful. For my personal life, its been the worst year of my life. But, with regard to the focus of this blog – programming and learning web development – its been productive. This is the close of the formative year of my life as a developer.

Lambda

I don’t know if I relayed this before, but one of the surprise changes that was dropped on us in October at Lambda School was that in order to pass the new abridged Computer Science unit and move on to Labs, we have to successfully pass a test called the GCA, or General Coding Assessment. Its a CodeSignal test. We were told that we’ll be on camera, have to be alone, have to show photo ID and can’t use Google to help us.

We learned about the test a few weeks before the end of the CS unit. We were told to try and take it 2 weeks before the end of the unit so that we don’t have to worry about passing it and also passing the final sprint challenge for CS in the same week. If we fail, there’s a 2-week cool-down period before we can reattempt it.

I tried to take it in the middle of October, when we learned about it. That’s when I discovered that I no longer have a valid photo ID. My license, from New York, is missing. I searched the house, the car and called the only two places I’d been to and actually set foot inside of in that time period – Costco and a supermarket chain here in California called Albertson’s. It didn’t turn up.

I ended up ordering a replacement license from the NYS DMV. It cost $17.50 and was supposed to arrive at our old house back home in 2 weeks. It never did, and I didn’t end up taking the GCA. I reached out to Frontdesk at Lambda when I learned about the photo ID requirement and didn’t hear back from them. It turned out that they had emailed my Lambda account, which I didn’t even remember having because I never use it. I ended up seeing the email weeks later. I think it was in mid-November. It was disheartening. The changes were so new that Student Success’ reply to me was basically, “What’s a GCA?”

So, I ‘failed’ Computer Science. I passed all of the sprints and each of the sprint challenges – some were by the skin of my teeth though. Because of this new requirement, and my discovery that I couldn’t take the test, I’m now in the middle of my 2nd go through the CS curriculum. Most of my cohort is here with me, as is another cohort that had previously completed Labs and was now moving into CS. I think they’re the last cohort to go through the old curriculum, and the general consensus is that the old curriculum was stronger. It was more detailed and there were projects and build weeks and team leads – all things that were removed from the new format.

This second attempt has been smoother than the first one. My head is a jumble though, because I’m now in a cohort with people from different places in my build weeks. Some students were ahead of me, some were behind me, some I’ve been in actual cohorts with, not just build week teams. Its one big, unhappy family right now. The majority of the students are as traumatized by data structures and algorithms as I was when I first went through this part of the curriculum. I’ve actually been helping some of them through Zoom and Slack, both with coding and with general sanity. Its nice to see that I’ve learned a little, but its also troubling to see other people in the same state of depression and panic that I was when I first endured this unit.

Anyway. I was chatting on Zoom with some other students and learned that one of them had taken the GCA without showing his photo ID. He said that we don’t need it to take the test. We only need it to verify the score if we want to show it to employers. For Lambda’s purposes, its unnecessary. This hadn’t been made clear to us when we got the initial surprise. Two weeks ago, when I learned this, I took the GCA. I passed it. It wasn’t a high score – we need 650 points to pass and I just scraped by with 652, but it was still a success.

We can’t discuss specific problems on the test, but its made up of 4 coding challenges. I think they’re randomly picked from a pool. We have 70 mins to solve them. When we’ve done these types of challenges in class, some of them take us less than a half hour to finish. Others take hours. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but from what others have said, we basically need to complete one question and some of another to pass. I managed that. I completed the first challenge and had a partially-complete second problem. It was enough to make the bottom of the barrel.

The next time I can reattempt the test is actually this Friday – New Year’s Day. So, I’m going to try it again and see if I can improve my score. My understanding is that Lambda keeps the highest score. Since I manage to pass, I don’t have the pressure of aiming for that anymore, so I can try to do better with no risk. But that leads me to another reaction…

I’m not happy that we were told that the test would be proctored and that we needed to have our photo ID to take it. I could have tried taking it back in October and again every two weeks after that. I might have passed and been in Labs now. I also might have a higher score now. I wasted a lot of time over potentially nothing. And to top it off, the day after I took the test, my replacement license arrived in the mail, here in CA.

Project – Mahiya

We have two weeks off from Lambda for winter break. Its the middle of the second week right now. On Monday next week (Jan 4th), classes start again. Prior to the break, Mahiya Hoque, a designer that I’d been in contact with, posted in Lambda’s Slack asking for help with her portfolio. She had built it using Elementor in WordPress and was having trouble setting up a sidebar. I offered to help, because I’ve used WordPress for my own blogs (like this one) and used Divi for Breast Cancer Comfort‘s website, at the behest of their marketing person.

Elementor frustrated me as much as Divi does, so I offered to just rebuild her site with React. She agreed. Over the course of a few weeks, between classes and whenever I could find time, I worked on it and got most of it done. I based it on the WordPress site. As I went, she put together a Figma file for the site and revised it. I ended up referencing that file and updated my work. It was my first time working with a designer. Her style is completely different from mine. Its interesting to build with someone else’s specifications. I have the main desktop site done and have to implement the mobile and tablet versions still and then tweak some things, but I’m happy with how its come along.

There were a few points in which I got stuck, but I eventually figured things out. My JavaScript is rusty, because we’ve been using Python for a while now at Lambda and haven’t touched any JavaScript in months, so I had to relearn React Router and some other things. My hope is to have it complete in a few weeks and add it to my portfolio, as well as giving her an actual portfolio.

Project – Iconic Web Studios

Earlier this week, I started experimenting with Next.js, a React framework. Its interesting to me to see that libraries now have frameworks. But that aside, I really like Next.js so far. I went through some of their tutorial a few days before Christmas. Then I got the idea to build something with it, just to see if I was getting the hang of it. So, I started a project I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks: a small web development company.

When we were still living in New York, I had wanted to do it. I was just waiting to get through more of Lambda first. I was going to call it Simple Design Solutions, but I back-burnered the idea for the rest of the year. Last week, I found a woman somewhere in the Midwest who already uses that name for her own work. I can’t remember but I think she knits or sews. Even though we’re in different states and different industries, I didn’t want to step on her toes, so I had to come up with a new name.

I listed words that I liked that were associated with building something unique, and finally (with the help of my 8-year-old) had to pick between Iconic Web Solutions and Iconic Web Studios. She liked Studios, so here we are.

Anyway. My plan is to build websites for small businesses and individuals. I won’t charge an up-front cost for the sites. Instead, I’ll charge a monthly fee to host, maintain and update the site. This should be less risky for small businesses to take a chance on, and it’ll allow me to improve my basic web building skills while providing a useful product and service to others. Hopefully, it’ll take off and be a win-win.

I’m going to launch it in January. I have some of the site drafted and online at Netlify. I need to figure out how to get clients though. Selling and advertising was never my strong-point.

Personal / Other

I’ve been reading a lot about landing programming jobs and about saving for retirement, securing my kids’ futures, helping the community around me and the world-at-large. This year, I discovered the concept of the digital nomad. Its a lifestyle that really appeals to me. Basically, its programmers (and other people who can work remotely) who travel and work from different places abroad. They see the world, eat the food, meet the people and work from their laptops. Their offices end up being beaches, mountains, hotels and really just interesting places. I want to do that. I want to code in the forest. I want to build websites from mountaintops and outside of the Pyramids and in so many other places. I want to take my kids with me so they can see the wonders of the world. If Iconic takes off, maybe in a few years, that will be my new reality.