Hurdles sometimes break my kneecaps

Most of my past posts have been happy. But don't worry faithful reader, I'm here to rain on your parade.

Because we learned core data today and I am struggling like a mofo.

Which is stupid because yesterday I rocked so hard and I was all, "JEN IS THE BEST CODER EVERRRRR".

and then today I can't even get my table view to load with a pre-loaded array!

I got 99 coding problems and a bitch ain't one. Well... one probably is a bitch.

Anyways, I thought I'd come here to my trusty blog to remind myself that even though my table view is currently biting the big one, I am a competent person.

Let me explain why I am in this current situation. Instead of starting the project from the bottom, I decided to start designing classes and develop the framework on the fly. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. I don't know why I think I can just hit the ground running and be the world's fastest sprinter. Spoiler alert self, you have never been a sprinter, you're an endurance person.

I know this! I did the same thing with knitting! Instead of asking people and taking lessons I just decided to try something brand new myself. This resulted in my first shawl (disaster), first sock (disaster), and first sweater (surprisingly not a disaster).

This is normal! Jen, you need to stop being so hard on yourself and thinking that you need to learn everything right now. There is a lot to know and you can't just be a robot and download everything into your brain.

(as an aside, I just finished the first book in the foundation series by Isaac Asimov and holy cow I am so much further in love with him that I have ever been and this run on sentence is to tell you that I've always loved him a great deal but I'm straight up fangirl obsessed with him now)

Deep Breath. Don't worry everyone, I'll get through this.

Sometimes life/knitting is perfect

I swear to god I'm not being paid to promote Mobile Makers. And in fact, I'm actually paying a decent amount of money to be there.

But I don't think I've ever loved anything quite as much as programming.

Actually, I've loved knitting that much... and we see where that has gotten me (rooms full of yarn and shawls and sheep shows).

(I'm saying that good things come from passions).

I would like to share two facts with you at this very moment. ONE IS KNITTING RELATED!!!!

Remember how I was on the death spiral part of the shawl? One of my many tricks for enjoying this part (and all parts) of the shawl is to not count the number of stitches I have. I just do the pattern until it looks biggish and then I count. Doing this has its advantages: you don't waste time counting a billion stitches, you don't constantly think about the sheer size of what you're doing.

Instead, you dig yourself into the comfort of what you love doing: knitting.

This can for sure backfire and that's what I thought happened the other day. I was working on my shawl when I noticed two things.

I was running out of yarn, and I had a lot of stitches. I started this project without calculating the amount of yarn I would need, but I figured I would just do the border in a different color.

After counting, I realized that I had actually gone past the stitches I needed to get by about 20 (which is ten rows of mind numbing stitch counts). Any knitter who knows my knitting style intimately (ggrrrowl) knows that I hate ripping stitches out.

Then I looked at the pattern. It turns out I was supposed to stop twenty stitches ago to start a new chart.... BUTTTT. The first 2/3 of the chart is the same as what I've been doing.

That's right. I stopped at exactly the right time and I am a knitting goddess.

The second thing I want to say is that custom delegation is literally one of the hardest concepts I have ever grasped. Remember how I was all, oh yea delegates do this? well... they do... but it's bad when you've heard 10 metaphors and all of them makes sense so none of them make sense.

After about a week it's finally starting to fully grasp it. But no time for explanations children. I have apps to make!

Delegates make me all philosophical. also shawls.

Even though I should be super frustrated, I am still super enamored with Mobile Makers. They've been giving us harder and harder projects and I'm still understanding. Which go me.

Anyways, remember how I was all like, "oh yea, segues are so easy, I am the best at them." I may have to amend that statement. I do get the general concept of them, but those paired with delegation make me a little iffy.

Delegation you ask? Yup. It's just like it sounds. It's when something makes something else do a task.... well sort of. It's actually super complicated and I'm just starting to wrap my head around. I'll probably post a clearer example once I start fully grasping it, but for now let me just give it my college try.

You have to use delegation when you are doing something in a different view  (or a different file) and want to know about it outside of that view (/file). I think it's a way to add more methods (making objects do things) that is cleaner and easier to break down. Some of the common objects we use all the time (view controller, table views, text fields) have delegates. These are already defined but generally I think of them as access to a level/power up. So with the objects 'built in' to objective c we can already do a  lot of stuff, but if we access their delegate we get to do ALL of their stuff.

Like Popeye. He is already a pretty good... sailor? Not really sure what he is. But then he eats spinach and he can do so much more stuff! Like knock people out... and other stuff. I'm not really up on my Popeye it would appear. But delegates are like spinach. We call them on a class and BOOM we can do way more.

From what I can tell, delegates are usually used when something is clicked or pushed and you want it to do something.

Phew. Right? That was all yesterday. We learned about delegates last week but yesterday we had to really learn them to build an app that basically just shows a different collection of tigers and lions when a corresponding button is clicked. WHICH IS SO MUCH HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS.

I think that's the main thing I've learned is that things that seem really easy are actually super complicated. I guess it makes sense because we think swiping to go to a new page makes sense, but we first had to learn how to see, how to make our finger move, and associate certain movements with certain results.

Think about being a baby. You didn't know anything as a baby (contrary to the movie Baby Geniuses). I was blown away a couple weeks ago when I learned that babies can't even recognize shapes until a couple months old. I mean that's why it takes so long to walk. Think about how complicated that is. But you don't even have to because your brain does it automatically.

Programming is making a brain. 

Ok.... you can tell I'm excited and into this right? So i'm going to be even nerdier right here. Because you know writing about knitting isn't nerdy enough.

I've always been fascinated by the brain. I've always been fascinated by philosophy and why things are how they are. And it turns out the programming is literally both of those.

Let me explain about the philosophy thing. (because the brain thing is explained up above sort of)

Philosophy takes abstract things and tries to make them concrete to be able to manipulate or solve problems. (I just blew my own brain writing that. I sound so deep and insightful)

Programming is wanting a computer or phone to do something. In order to do that, you have to conceptualize a lot of stuff. You have to break down the task into different actions and parts. You have to translate that into words (the programming language). And the programming language is telling the computer what ones and zeros and numbers to fire in order for it to accomplish things.

Why yes I am a little iffy on how programming languages and computers interact. However did you guess?

I realize there is no knitting here... but I am on the death marathon part of the shawl. For those of you unfamiliar with knitting, it's when you literally have a row that is 300 stitches and you have to add four stitches every other row in order to get to 400 stitches. You don't get a lot knit vertically and so your brain is like, "UGHHHH I just did one row and it took fifteen minutes and I have so many more of these".

Speaking of knitting... it might be time to switch to a sock as my portable project.

Segue... the final frontier... or the first

This'll have to be quick because class starts in six minutes.

I figured I should finish my segue discussion.

So now that you know that we are essentially passing an object with some sort of information in it, it should be easy to grasp what a segue is. All it is, is a way to pass information from one screen to the next.

Say you made an app to play mad libs. You have the user enter a word for each category (noun, type of weather, favorite color, verb) and then at the very end you want to show the filled out mad lib. You would have to make a segue to pass the word from the screen it was entered on to the last screen.

Pretty straightforward. The thing that tripped me up, was what segue was. It acts sort of weird in the code. It wasn't really a property, and it wasn't really a method, but then it was explained that it's it's own class.

and voila. I got it.

MORE TO COME LATER.

Spring Love and what object oriented programming means

I have a confession. I thought that Mobile Makers was full of shit.

You know that saying, if it sounds too good to be true than it probably is? I thought that applied. What are the reasons I was skeptical about Mobile Makers?

1. They say, anyone can learn it (even people who haven't programmed before)
2. They say, people will want to hire you after the class if you work hard (I've been working hard my entire life and no one has jumped at the chance to hire me.)
3. They say, Mobile Makers has a network of peers and mentors that want to help you.
4. They say, Mobile Makers teaches you things that you can't learn on your own.

I don't want to sound like an advertisement for them... but I know for a fact that 3/4 of those things are true (since I haven't completed the class, I don't know if people will want to hire me).

Here is my second confession: I'm in love with Mobile Makers.

Also, I'm in love with life at the moment because it's SPRING and SUNNY.

Yes that is what I'm currently knitting. If you're patient I'll show you what I'm knitting at the end of this. and YES I am doing this class in downtown Chicago. No more suburbs for this girl, I'm an official big city person. I'm probably also loving life because I started taking anti-depressants again. Huzzah mental health.

But back to my undying love for Mobile Makers. I've spent ten hours for the past six days (well... only eight yesterday) dedicating myself to learning objective c. AND IT'S WORKING!!!

I've always known that I pick things up fast, but I didn't realize how fast I can pick things up if I can ask why things happen. One thing I've learned from the past week is that once I know the reason you do something or the reason something works... then I understand it.

Case in point. Segues. What is a Segue in objective c? GOOD QUESTION LET ME ANSWER.

(I'll try to tone it down... sorry just got excited that I TOTALLY KNOW HOW TO CODE)
(I know I just used parenthesis above but I have a funny story about the word segue. Up until a couple years ago, I spelled it segueway because I didn't realize that segue is pronounced seg-way. Thanks sister and Bekky for making me not look like an idiot! Oh english.)

A segue is a way to go from one screen to another and pass along information when you do it. Two points I'd like to make about this. First, this is the entire point of object oriented programming. Programming is basically turning computer language into words so we can modify it. Object oriented programming's strength is that you can break a complicated idea into smaller parts, create a thing or an action (method/function), and use those smaller parts to make a giant thing.

Example (because that was super vague): I want to tell a computer/robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I could write it this way:

1. open bread bag
2. take two pieces of bread out of bad
3. place slice of bread on the table
4. open jar of peanut butter
5. pick up knife
6. put knife in open jar of peanut butter
7. put peanut butter on knife
8. take knife out of jar
9. rub peanut butter on one side of the bread until evenly coated.
10. put down knife
11. open jar of raspberry jam (the best)
12. pick up knife
13. put knife in open jar of jam
14. put jam on knife
15. take knife out of jar
16. rub jam on one side of the bread until evenly coated
17. put down knife
18. put the two pieces of bread together with the peanut buttered side and jam side touching each other.

That was a lot longer than you thought it would be, but not unbearable. The trouble with this comes when you want to make the ULTIMATE peanut butter and jam sandwich with multiple layers. You would have to repeat 7 steps just to tell the person to do the same thing as before (lines 4-10 are essentially the same as 11-17). And what would happen if you forgot to say to open the jar? then you'd have to go through a huge list of steps to find out where you missed something.

With objective C, you can turn an action into something that's repeatable.

I can hear your attention waning so I'll make this quick.

Instead of having one list, you would have a couple. the first list would turn the 7 lines of code into one method that you would call on whatever property(peanut butter or jam) you want.

prepare bread for sandwich:(topping added)

1. open jar of (topping added)
2. pick up knife
3. put knife in jar of (topping added)
4. put (topping added) on knife
5. take knife out of jar of (topping added)
6. rub (topping added) on one side of the bread.
7. put down knife

Make Sandwich

1. open bread bag
2. take two pieces of bread out of bad
3. place slice of bread on the table
4. prepare bread for sandwich: peanut butter
5. prepare bread for sandwich: jam
6. put the two pieces of bread together with the peanut buttered side and jam side touching each other.

MUCH SIMPLER IN THE LONG RUN. Which is the point of coding. Yes you can do something the long way, but if you want to create something automated that does the same action over and over... why not be lazy about it?

Ok. I was going to talk about segues but that'll have to wait for tomorrow. Because it's time to figure out how to make a tic tac toe game.

PS. I'm making a shawl.

Logic, Life Changes, and Mobile Makers

First off, I'd like to admit that yes I failed on my new years eve resolution gift thing to Bekky. Perhaps I was a little ambitious. Alas, the first step to succeeding is failing... or something like that.

For the next two months this blog is going to be a little different.

(as an aside: I've often thought that I'd be more interested in writing in my blog if it was less blah and more actual Jen. I guess this will test it.)

Why are the next two months different? Because four months ago I decided to change my life. I was sitting at work, miserable because an attorney had just yelled at me for being the devil (or something akin to a demon), when I read an article about something called a "Programming Bootcamp." Now it might surprise you (nine) readers that I'm interested in programming... but let me explain the logic behind it.

(HA GET IT?! Programming is all about logic and so I made a joke referencing that.)

As you may have gathered, I love knitting. It is normally quite impossible to make a living from knitting, so with that off the table I decided to look at what I like about knitting. I love that it's repetitive and you can sink into a rhythm, I love that you can create a finished something, I love that you're constantly learning and pushing yourself to do something new, and most of all I love the community that surrounds it. All these things can be applied to programming.

So long story short, I've spent the last four months saving money, studying objective c, and applying to Mobile Makers.

Let me also say that I am a very skeptical person. I like to believe the best in people and businesses and education, but as my dad always says, "Plan for the worst, hope for the best," (I come from a long line of pessimists realists). Maybe I've also grown jaded from working in legal finance.

That being said, for the next two months I'm going to do a daily blog about my experiences coding at Mobile Makers. I'm going to try and make this a mostly positive blog but it may contain some rants and breakdowns.

Enough introduction. We learned segues today and I have a lot of night work to do to make sure I get it.

DON'T WORRY I'LL STILL BE KNITTING ON THE TRAIN AND POSTING YARNY PICTURES.