Code - Blog Posts

Guess who jumped into his first React project without any planning and now continues to add features thereby creating a monstrosity of spaghetti code. THIS guy!

WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTED TO PUT THIS MANY PARENTHESES IN SCHEME. MY IDE IS LITERALLY OUT OF COLORS FOR THE AMOUNT OF PARENTHESES I AM TYPING.

Went to React’s website to learn the Tic Tac Toe tutorial (it’s about time I got around to it) and was pleasantly surprised to see this. Way to go, React. 

Black People in Programming/Computer Science

This is BY NO MEANS an exhaustive list. In fact, there are MANY, MANY, MORE. I’m just trying to draw attention to the major contributions black people have made to the Computer Science / Programming community. 

BLACK LIVES MATTER.

- Lindsay Grace : Designing games with social impacts.

- Marsha Williams : First black woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science. She also lead many initiatives to increase black representation in STEM careers.

- Clennita Justice, Aggrey Jacobs, and Travis McPhail : Employees at Google improving Google Play Books and Google Maps.

- Katherine Johnson : Her work with NASA was critical in putting humans in space.

- Clarence Ellis : First black man to get a PhD in Computer Science. He pioneered Operational Transformation, early group collaboration software for plaintext documents.

- Dorothy Vaughan : Paved the way for African American females at NASA and in programming in general. TAUGHT HERSELF FORTRAN. BEFORE THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED. Imagine trying to learn a low-level programming language WITHOUT Stackoverflow or even ctrl + f. 

For those of you who are worried about AI taking over the world, this is the sentence produced by a “neural network” (a fancy name for my relative frequency matrix) after I had it read Beowulf, Galen, Guinea, Little Women, Mansfield Park, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Call of the Wild. (All are freely available on Project Gutenberg in many filetypes including plain text, btw).

Being able to access all of the WSL distros, the powershell, and the cmd from the same place is a super cool feature with the new windows terminal, but you know what’s even cooler? Getting to change all of the colors and fonts so easily. I’m very happy.

I have so much respect for the ToString() method of Pandas Dataframes in Python.

If you’re wondering why, it’s because I’m currently trying to make a halfway decent depiction of a C# matrix multidimensional array that just puts my hashkeys in the right places and things are not going well at all. 

Making a favicon for your website is one of the simple pleasures. 

You know what I haven’t thought about in while? Ruby. Maybe I need to polish off the old gemstone. 

You’d think after all the time I’ve spent on front-end dev I’d be able to at least write efficient CSS. You’d think. 

I continue to be surprised today. Haskell is also cool, at least based on what I’m reading. I haven’t written any yet, though, so we’ll see. 

Maybe I’m just in an open mood. Should I break out the old assembly docs and test that theory? 

.... Nah, I definitely shouldn’t do that.

It has builtins that let you change the color of the text in the console! By far my prettiest Hello World to date.

Console.WriteLine(”Not Bad”);

Alright so I find myself liking C# and the .NET framework. For anyone who hasn’t delved into understanding what it is and WHY it is: .NET is, like all other frameworks, a collection of tools for developers. Except this one is on steroids, and tailored to Windows BY Microsoft, meaning you can make awesome Windows applications without tracking down everything you need. It’s all just right there. 

C# is basically C++ with all of the .NET adapters actively available. You can also think of it like Java but instead of running inside of the JVM, it runs on Windows. 

Microsoft’s documentation is also really well-written for it, which is nice.

BONUS in case anyone is curious: ASP.NET is a framework that extends the overarching .NET to provide tools specifically for web application dev. I haven’t gotten far into the ASP documentation yet so I can’t say much about it other than that.

There are only 2 options when I’m writing my commit messages:

1. “I haven’t pushed in a while so here are a LOT of changes to at least 7 files.”

2. “I hate myself because I worked for 2 hours tonight and as I write this message I realize that all I have to show for that time is a 3 line for loop.”

CSS, the most toxic lover

Oh CSS,

I have not a single guess

how one can hope to ever

with you win success.

Sweet CSS, 

you leave my sanity a mess

and my div tags all in shambles

while I trudge on with hopelessness.

Bitter CSS,

though you display indifference

as you treat me miserably

to you I will always return, nonetheless.

So I RECOGNIZE that the .NET framework is immensely popular for a good reason. I RECOGNIZE that Visual Studio is a wonderful, amazingly built tool that can probably cut my development time in half. I also RECOGNIZE that simply MAKING A PROJECT has taken me entirely too long.

All of that being said, I RECOGNIZE that the problem definitely is with me rather than with one of the most prominent frameworks, development tools, and collection of programming languages in the industry.

That doesn’t mean I’m not still angry.

Django actually has a built-in tag specifically for generating the latin gibberish used in samples. They already solved every real problem for developers, so they proceeded to solve problems you didn’t even know you wanted solved. 

Then 2 weeks after this, looking at the chaos that is your disorganized, jumbled mess of code angry and disappointed in yourself.

Rinse and repeat.

Am i the only one who does this