Jasmine and Pollination

Yesterday was a glorious day. A storm rolled in the night before and another was on its way. Our land was covered in a deep peaceful calm. The largest pine tree in the backyard was pollinating yesterday. I showed King the tender buds that were opening when a light yellow powder poured from the branches. I explained the dusting going on above his head, but King was more apt to hide under the tree's branches. My fingers were covered in pollen and it was straight to the tub for the boys as soon as we entered the house. 

If I hadn't already determined to do so my Mrs. surely would have put such an objective upon my mind. She was not pleased at all with our shoes or dirt- and pollen-covered hands. 

The second storm rolled in quietly as promised and hung about the vicinity well into the afternoon. After being stuck inside all day today I know the King will be ready to pull me back into the woods and run around his favorite tree, tomorrow.

In other news I am now only one final and one project away from earning my front-end web development nanodegree with Udacity.com! I am very excited at the latest progress. After several changes in comments, indentation and a few weeks in the code I am now finished with the test-driven programming of Jasmine JS. Well, finished as in with this project. I am certain a great amount of Jasmine JS awaits my future.

Rewards in the Struggle for Knowledge

New day new possibilities. 

I've been studying web development with Udacity.com since last November and am in the home stretch. After building a mock static page, manipulating the DOM with javascript, building a Frogger game clone and designing a pizza website to optimize to the utmost speed I am now building a SPA, single page application, that incorporates Google Maps API and other third party APIs to highlight locations in a specific neighborhood, and another project incorporating Jasmine JS's error-checking/testing framework.

The Google Maps API has required learning a new library (Knockout JS and jQuery) and reading the documentation to comprehension to implementation. Knockout uses a MVVM (Model View ViewModel) framework that separates the Model from the ViewModel. The View is the UI (User Interface). Knockout's model creates an octopus hub where the Model and ViewModel never interact with each other directly but speak through a hub via data-binding and applyBindings commands. 

When I'm in the thick of programming and struggling through the solutions to my quandaries it helps to remind myself of how far I've come, and how much html, css and javascript I am now able to code. The ability to learn is a beautiful thing. The "ah-ha" moments make every struggle worthwhile. And I hope a rewarding career full of new possibilities awaits me just a little further along in the journey.