Fun Fact: My total sleep intake was maybe 2 hours. I really shouldn’t be getting used to this.
I’ve done the early mornings before when I worked as a TCA (Test Center Administrator) so I’m not having trouble with that part. Its the being up all day part. I don’t get home till about 6:30-7pm. Add homework and regular maintenance to this and I’ve got a pretty tight schedule.
Leila is working with us on Career planning. This part of the program includes us doing critical thinking on what we want to do with our job searching. For the first part of the class we took an assessment test to find map out some of our characteristics and what industry they would match up too. For my test, my results were conventional (organized), social (helpful), and artistic (creative). When I think about myself, I do feel like these descriptions match me. I considered myself to be very organized in general, but especially with work and school. I have a place and a space for everything. Then there are two things about me that everyone knows, one, if you let me I can talk for three days straight and two, I WILL talk to anyone. The length of a conversation that I carry with a stranger is inspiring and something I am known for. I would never question the social result. As far as being artistic, that comes from my background of graphic design and fine arts, which calls the individual to be creative.
With this job placement assessment, the path that I was suggested to follow was that of education or training. I really wasn’t surprised by these results, my mom and sister are both teachers and I’m a TA for some online classes. I was more surprised that the assessment was so accurate.
Once we came back from break, we started class with Dawn. Dawn is our coding genus in charge (that was for you Dawn, cause I know you read these).
We were introduced to Processing for this class. Processing is a sketchbook text editor that works with different platforms. We will be using Java with this editor for the next two weeks. And its cool because Dan Shiffman who created Processing is Dawn’s professor/friend.
Processing is different to many text editors I’ve used. Besides editing, it is a compiler IDE (Integrated Development Environment ) bugger and a language as well. Good thing it also comes with references, tutorials/examples and libraries all on the website.
The first thing we had to practice with the editor was plotting points. Processing runs its display on a coordinate plain (think back to X axis, Y axis from you favorite math class back in grade school).
You have to plug in the points to the editor. The points tell the shape where its located (X axis, Y axis) and what size it is (width, height).
circle (50, 52, 100, 100);
Another potion of processing or creating with Java is creating a canvas. Unlike what I know in HTML/CSS, you have to print (or call?) your background. If you don’t do this, you pretty much will miss out on a big part of your display.
Now on all our projects we have to create comments with in our code. I can say I don’t comment enough on any of my coding projects. I honestly just forget all the time. Its something that in the moment of coding, you don think is important. You feel every line of code you put in at the time and you think that you always know why its there. Fast forward to a few months later and you reread your code and can’t figure out where your stylesheet even links to your index code (actual story of my life).
line(30, 20, 85, 75); //This is a comment line
Identifying my challenges for the next few days will be among learning to plot points on the invisible grid of Processing and adding comments to my code work.
Kellie Porter 