I’m currently on a bus traveling from Cape Cod to Boston. My car doesn’t work, so I took a bus to mom’s house for Thanksgiving. I was at her house for more than a week because I had no money for food, but now I’m on my way home with some cash in the bank.

I like the writing I have been doing lately about coding. I finally signed up for Codecademy Pro, so I should be able to get a good deal more instruction and experience from the Codecademy website. Writing this blog is cathartic, but it also helps me to think through aspects of my life such as coding and musical practice. For now I’m going to stick to writing about coding as I think the musical practice stuff is a bit played out for the moment.

Let me break it down a bit like I have been doing for my commentary on musical practice, highlighting certain elements of coding in order to organize my thoughts a bit.

HTML/CSS: This is by far the easiest aspect of coding, though I need to work on them both. Especially with CSS, I don’t think I am doing that good a job of styling pages. I need to commit myself to creating better sites and pages. In particular, I would like to create a parallax page for my online work portfolio, and something cool for my music. In fact, I need to do a lot to promote myself as a musician, but that’s a whole other topic altogether. Ultimately, I want to be able to manage a few well designed websites dedicated to all things me, not in a self-centered way, but as a way my colleagues and students can learn about what I’m doing and what I want to be doing.

JavaScript: There is actually a javascript.com site that teaches JavaScript. I had forgotten about it, but I see that I have previously bookmarked it. I’ll have to check it out. JavaScript has been very difficult for me once I move beyond the very basics. I really struggle with understanding JSON requests, although I have been able to follow a tutorial to the point where I have a working URL shortener/lengthener app, and I used to have a working weather app.

jQuery: jQuery is generally simpler than plain JavaScript, though it also gets pretty abstract once it moves beyond very simple structures. Now that I have signed up for Codecademy Pro I will be able to get more practice at it, and then I can continue to fork ideas from the W3Schools site as I have been doing. I have a feeling that jQuery will covery most of what I want to be able to do with JavaScript.

Codecademy: I finally signed up for Codecademy Pro, and I have put myself on the full stack coding path. I really want my coding skills to reach a higher level so that I can create, and possibly sell, apps, though I don’t yet know what those apps might be. Once I complete the full JavaScript tutorial, the full stack syllabus has me moving on to the Angular and React JavaScript languages and then to Ruby, Git, and the command line. Funny, though, that the full stack syllabus does not include jQuery. I’ll keep up with that on my own, but I would like to fully complete all of the full stack coursework. Ultimately, I would like my coding skills to approach that of a professional in the field, though that may be a bit of overkill. For now, let me just follow along with the syllabus and see where it leads me. Coding is one of those areas of intellectual production that is much broader and deeper than I am currently aware of.

W3Schools: This is a goldmine for hacking and forking code. Its tutorials are a bit weak, but there are lots of code examples that are free for the forking. This is how I have created most of the small JavaScript and jQuery bits I have included in my websites. It’s really an excellent resource - I keep this site open while I am trying to add interactive features to web pages.