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.

TMBP: Frogger and sledding

Late last week/early this week I finished the JavaScript tutorial with code academy. Now I'm back to creating a frogger clone with Udacity. It's a fun project. The canvas and engine has already been created. They can be edited, but the first step is to cause the enemies and player to render, move and collide properly. The code academy classes did great work in helping me understand object oriented programming. Within two days I've got the characters rendered and moving. Now it's time to construct a collision formula. Something that will calculate the pixel box and when there is 0 space between the enemy and player cause the game to reset. If I don't have it down by tonight then tomorrow for sure.

King pulled me up the stairs today, I thought to play, but then he grabbed his boots. I guess he decided it was time to play outside. And it was snowing so who could blame him? We bundled up and slid down our local hill for 20 or 30 minutes before he started losing his mittens. Watching him interact with his environments has been one of my favorite things to do in the recent years. Everything is new and I guess will be new for the next couple years, at least. All the tromping up the snow covered hill helps his appetite. When we got in he ate two apples and a pack of crackers. Guess we can call sledding a work out!