self.promises - Week II

Without further ado, here's what I already did:

• (re)wrote the server part of the shopping list
• rewrote the algorithm from work, found in my lp repo
• went to a local meetup, leipzig.js
  • overall it was at least interesting

  • for my taste it was too much "let's use JS for that", but if you want to learn something you probably have to do that for a while

    I still thing a certain balance would be better, i.e. being more aware of what you're using right now is not so good at

  • next time I do such a thing I should be better preparated (experiment a bit in advance, bring concrete questions, insist on getting answers for the ones I have)

There also was a cool d3 hacknight with some other people at spreadshirt, with some interesting results. I had a bit of a head start because I read a paper about it in advance and I dabbled a bit with it before, but it was still too much stumbling around.

I think I'll write a small tutorial on using d3 and the concepts behind it (yes, that's another promise), but the two things that helped me better understand d3 so far was the paper and a little tutorial that explained the concept of the enter/update/exit selections.

Now that I think about it, I'll also write a TODO with further plans for experiments with d3.

Regarding the previous promises, here's what's remaining and bugging me most:

• I didn't write the letter, yet
• I didn't think enough about learning and also didn't write about it so far.
• I did think a bit more before writing code, but I still struggle with noticing when I am stuck and then consciously working to get unstuck or at least learn something about myself when being stuck

The entertainment/doing separation is something I am not so sure about: I don't think I can work on stuff I am not really passionate about all the time, but still I feel bad when I am using entertainment as a substitute for having to think. I think one of the things that helps me is going "public" about stuff I'd like to do, but only to a certain extend. That is, if I don't get asked about what is going on with the things I said I was working on and I am not really motivated, that project will probably not get done.

All in all, I think that one of the central themes of Apprenticeship Patterns is really something important: be aware of what you do, how you're doing it and reflect on how it's going.

Well, that's it for now I'm going to do a few of the things on my list for the weekend.

Ok, ok, one last experiment:

var post = document.querySelector("#rambling");
var text = post.textContent;
var words = text.split(/\W/).filter(function(w) {
    return w.match(/^\w+$/);
});
var selfish_words = words.filter(function(w) {
    return ["I","me","my","myself"].some(function(s) {
        return s == w;
    });
});
var text_stats = document.createElement("p");
selfish_words.toString = function() {
    return this.reduce(function(s,w) {
        return s == "" ? s + w : s + ", " + w;
    }, "");
};
text_stats.innerHTML = "This post contains "
    + words.length + " words, "
    + selfish_words.length
    + " of them being 'i', 'me' or 'myself'. "
    + "Actually, here they are: " + selfish_words + "."
post.appendChild(text_stats);

Now that I think about it, the fact that this little stats snippet above that hopefully appeared in your browser is actually displayed before these paragraphs, quite neatly demonstrates that script tags can and do cause pages to stop rendering at a load/parse time and only continue after they finish executing. I read about it, but here it is, live and right before my eyes. So beware, here be dragons!

In fact, the stats aren't even correct because of this. Oh my, intersting indeed, you should go read a good presentation about it.

Take care,
lu.