Introduction to Linux

Well, my previous project didn't last long. The pressures of work, and number of hours I've been working, have overtaken everything. I've just taken a week off, so I feel a bit less exhausted, and have the energy to start another course. So many half finished courses that I was thoroughly enjoying but ran out of steam to complete. So many more courses I'd like to take.

On Friday, the long awaited Linux Foundation course Introduction to Linux was released. I have a basic knowledge of Linux but many gaps so I'm looking forwards to filling those in. Another thing that I find useful about taking courses is vocabulary. I have very few words for things. I don't speak tech-speak. I don't remember the names for things. I remember concepts and ideas, but I'm really bad at labels for them. I'm not sure how anyone at work has the faintest idea what I'm talking about most of the time.

When I took one of Udacity's first courses, cs101, there were comments on the forums telling people to search for the answer instead of asking. I think that's horrible. One of the biggest problems when you're starting off in a subject is not being able to find answers for yourself. Even Google, with its auto completion and predictive suggestions can't work out what to tell me if I ask about a thingy that makes the whatsit do this. As a beginner, you don't know what is available. You don't know what to ask to get the answer because you haven't got enough of the picture yet. I would have to ask my husband or friends to give me the words to be able to look things up for myself.

Anyway, back to the course. I've been looking forwards to this for a long time. I hope I don't run out of energy before I complete it.

Week 1: Likes and Dislikes - Webpages

A Page I Like

Page: League of Legends page
Genre: Gaming
Category: art

• Beautiful rich images
• On mouseover, parts of the page highlight and extra details are shown, revealing something visually interesting. For example, the branches down the sides of the page. These touches do not convey any content.
• Images of champions are monochrome but on mouseover become richly coloured. This indicates to click, on which an information screen opens up. The wall of text wasn't so enticing. It was two paragraphs of text with no title or indication of what it was about without reading it. It's white on a dark blue background. I find it very hard to read white on a dark background and find I am reluctant to try.
• There is a video modal. The video player has the controls visible, which I find very important. I very quickly stop watching videos when there is no indication as to how they are. Around the video player is ice. It is a small but it adds interest to the page.
• The social sharing and branding icons at the bottom of the page seem completely out of place.

A Page I Don't Like

Page: Audible
Genre: Sales
Category: inaccessible, printed page

My main dislike for this page is from a functional point of view. The site sells audio books. The page consists of a large image which contains information about the site followed by a paragraph of text. The information in the image is not relayed in any other form on the page. Because it is an image, when enlarging it, the text becomes fuzzy. This site is not accessible to those who have visual impairments either requiring large text, or the use of a screen reader.

This page does not take advantage of the media. It looks to me just like a printed page put online.

A New Project

Background

Last year, CSS Zen Garden became 10 years old. I'm not quite sure why I went there again recently but it took me back to when I first made a webpage, back in the 1990s. That, and the consequent pages, were to distribute information to my students so that if they missed a lecture they could still access all the material they needed. This was for maths. No support for symbols. To get past this, I made images of the mathematics by taking screenshots of LaTeX and I painstakingly included images in my pages. I made as little into images as I could so there were symbols for less than or equals to, or subset or union. I was somewhat obsessed with my pages passing tests. I checked my page with Bobby, which checked for accessibility, and the W3 validator, which checks for correct markup. I'm sure the html I wrote back then was horrible. Without CSS, formatting was done using tables embedded in tables embedded in...oh dear, yuck!

In 2003, CSS Zen Garden made its appearance. Oh how I admired those pages. The feeling of wonder I felt back then comes so easily when I think of the beautiful sites that could be created from the same page. How I longed to be able to do something so beautiful but I didn't. I had done some very basic css to get away from those horrible tables, but by then I'd left my job and the need to make pages was much diminished.

Today

Now, 10 years on, we have so many more tools at our disposal. CSS is so much more powerful. Browsers can display more. The new pages on CSS Zen Garden are so much more amazing than ever. The creativity shown by these amazingly talented people is wonderous. The interactivity and interesting features included in the page makes me want to stay there and just play. I want to learn two things.

1. What is it about the pages that I love? What makes me want to stay? What makes me want to play?
2. How, technically, are the pages created?

For the first part, I'm going to pick two pages, one I like and one I don't like and try to work out what I like and don't like. For the second, I'm going to pick a page from CSS Zen Garden and investigate how each feature is made.

Accessibility

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've just been through Google's Accessibility course. Today, I found an introductory video to this course, explaining some of the thinking behind accessibility. It's an advert for the class, but it also shows some of the problems a person with visual impairments might have in visiting a website.

Google Developers Live: Accessibility MOOC

It sounds like they might be doing more courses in the future, including some thinking behind designing websites to be accessible. I do hope they do them.

Changes - A Busy Year

The Beginning Of the Year

It's been a very busy year and so I've had to put my voracious consumption of courses on hold. That doesn't mean I haven't been learning though! I spent most of the first half of the year writing grading scripts for a course which meant I gained a lot of practice in Python. It's amazing the difference a few comments from a colleague made in helping me improve. Another thing that helped a lot was sticking to code style rules which took a way a lot of the thinking about how to lay out the code, especially where to break lines.

Starting to Dream

During this time, I started to realise that what I really wanted to do was to code. Not just some of the time. All of the time. I looked longingly over at engineering, wishing I could be part of it but knew that couldn't be, afterall, what do I know? Just a bit a Python and not much at that. I started to read all the code reviews on github, trying to understand what was going on. I saw things that I knew I could do, just text changes, but that would be a start, right?

Problems...

There were two problems though.

1. Github. I'd had a bad experience the summer before trying to get it set up. I didn't understand. I finally got stuff working but all I was aware of was that I could break stuff but I didn't know how. I didn't know what the UI was doing. It was all mysterious and I couldn't work out what was going on. Then things changed in how it was set up and I couldn't work out how to commit stuff to the right branch. The fear grew to the extent that I stopped trying to do anything.
2. Getting the site running locally. That involved appengine and getting the site from github. Urgh...github.

Overcoming the Problems

Getting the site from github wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Setting up appengine went remarkably smoothly. Getting all the things installed was 'interesting' and I managed to not get things working so needed help with that, but eventually it was all running. Yay! Now the time had come. I had the opportunity to make some text changes. Not worth an engineer's time really, and I could make those basic changes. Time to overcome the fear of github.

I was so scared! What if I pushed to the wrong branch? What if I broke everything? What if it did everything wrong? What if everyone got mad at me? I made my branch. Phew! I'd given up on the UI by now. It was too mysterious and doing things I didn't know about. All command line for me. I still didn't understand how anything worked, but I made my changes to the file.

A colleague made a comment that I shouldn't worry and that as long as I hadn't put in a pull request, nothing bad could happen. I panicked. I'd just typed "pull", so that must be a "pull request", right? What had I done? I was filled with horror. It took me a while to realise that this wasn't a pull request. Seriously, how can it be a request to github to pull but not be a pull request? What confusing terminology!

One advantage of working remotely is that no one sees the tears. Trying to overcome the fear of github was hard. Really hard. But thanks to my supportive colleagues, I made it.
The next part was the pull request itself. Had I messed anything up? Had I messed everything up? No, it was fine. Just a few things and it was all ok. My first 'code', albeit text changes and a bit of html, was live. That felt good. Soooo good.

Carrying On

During the summer, while I was helping user-test something a colleague had written when he made the comment that he'd be happy for me to work for him. Oh my goodness! If only...dream dream dream...doing something I want to do, working for someone I hold in high esteem, someone I can learn so much from...if only...if only...

An Exciting Suggestion

After a meeting, I was hanging out and chatting with a colleague when it came up that a certain tool would be useful for checking a student's exam submissions. He suggested I coded it, and in my naivety, I agreed. Boy, did I not know what I was letting myself in for. For the second time this year, I'd blindly decided to do something without having a clue what it involved. Well, I want to code so I'd better show I can do it, hadn't I? This felt like make-or-break time. Javascript? Well, I don't know anything about that but it's kind of like Python so it'll be ok, won't it?

Implementation

The logic required wasn't so hard, and it was adding stuff to an already created webpage so I could just build on what was already there. I wrote the code. It fetched the data from the server, made a nice list, joined the list and then displayed the results. Except it didn't. It displayed nothing. What the heck was going on? I put in some console logs. What? The list is empty? How can the list be empty. What is it doing? Why is it skipping stuff? What is going on? There are the web requests. They're working. The list is empty. I could not work out what was going on so in the end I had to ask for help. "Asynchronous web requests."

Mind blown

My mind was completely blown. I didn't even know asynchronous was a thing. My nice little ordered world had fallen apart. Everything I "knew" didn't work anymore. I was going to have to learn to think in a completely different way and fast. The exams were less than a week away. I recoded it. It kind of worked but it didn't seem like a good way to do it. It felt hacky, and it was. Then I found out about promises. I can't remember how. I don't think I knew that's what they were called then, I think it was just some way to write the code so it didn't execute until after the web request had returned. I found out that as the results come back, angularJS, the frame work we use, displays them one by one. I didn't need to make the list and then join the results, angular would take care of that. I still get a rush of childlike pleasure and excitement from seeing the page fill up bit by bit as the different pieces of information become available.

Pull Request

It took me quite a while with my finger hovering over the button to actually click and submit the pull request. I felt so vulnerable and exposed. Was it good enough or was it just going to be rejected as a load of unusable rubbish? Apparently it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. (I'm not convinced, and looking back, it's completely cringe-worthy.) It was such a good feeling to have the code out there and usable, only an internal page, but still, I managed to do it! I don't know if it made a difference or not to how things turned out for me, but in my mind, it was a turning point.

Every Opportunity

There's a typo? I'll fix it. There's something else needs updating? I'll do it. It had got to the point where nothing else was good enough. I wanted this so badly. All my free time was taken up reading, watching videos, trying things out. Learning and becoming familiar. Preparing for what I hoped might be. Then finally, the day came. It was suggested that I switch over. My dream was coming true!

Campus Party

Just before I switched over, I went to Campus Party UK. It was inspiring. I couldn't wait to get my hands dirty. There were two talks in particular which were particularly exciting. One by Daniel Knell on testing Javascript which gave me a clear overview of how testing works and what is available. He very generously spent about half an hour talking to me afterwards. The other talk was on git, by John Britton. That was followed by a relaxed group chat where John answered questions and gave out some github stickers. I have one on my kindle and the other on my laptop. Yay for github! As you've probably guessed, I'm not scared any more. Careful, yes. Scared, no. Git is an amazing tool, so powerful. I understand so much more about it now than I did before, but there is still a lot to learn.

The Switch

Mid-September it happened. I switched. Now my colleague that a few months back said he'd be happy for me to work for him is my tech lead. How lucky am I? It doesn't seem possible that I'm in the position I'm in now.

First Code Review

Now we're back to scary. Not that my code is bad, I know it is, but it's going to get better, but as to whether I'll be accepted. Will people be horrified and wonder why on earth I was allowed to switch? Will they wonder what I'm doing there? Will I be rejected? Will I be able to make the grade or will I be sent back? Please, don't send me back. I just could not take it. Imposter syndrome, anyone?

On the other hand though, I'm excited. Now I've got to write good code and not the horrible, embarrassing stuff I wrote before. It's going to get a thorough code review and I'm excited about that. What an opportunity! Ever since I took Udacity's CS101 a year and a half ago, I've longed for someone to look at my code. To rip it to pieces and tell me how to make it better. To be a perfectionist and know it's not perfect and have no idea how to make it better is so hard to deal with. Now I'm getting the feedback to enable me to make those improvements.

Onwards

So, I'm going to carry on learning as much as I can, contribute as much as I can, and enjoy the wonderful gift that I've been given in this opportunity.

Accessibility

I didn't actually intend to write this post. I just popped back here to share a link to something I discovered a couple of days ago. I came across 'aria-hide' in some code and didn't know what it was so I looked it up. While looking around the topic of accessibility (a topic I care about a lot), I found a Google course on web accessibility explaining simple ways in which a web site can be made more accessible. It's well worth the time it takes to go through it. Two useful plugins it mentions are a screen reader, chromeVox which works in chrome, so you can check how a website functions if you can't see it, and another plugin, Accessibility Developer Tools which checks how accessible a site is, including whether the colour contrast is good enough or not for people with reduced vision. For details of how to use these, see the first lesson in the course.

Some other useful links I found were on the alt attribute for img tags. I thought that having to have them meant they had to say something but having listened to a page read the alt and then the description next to it, I went looking to see how it should really be used. I found these two resources which throw some light on the subject. The blog post, HTML5 Accessibility: aria-hidden and role=”presentation”, discusses the problem of an image and headline linking to the same thing, and on the issue of how to tag images, I found this very helpful: WebAIM

Decision Made

Of the three courses, I chose Think Again: How to Reason and Argue. I'm way behind at the moment but as there are no deadlines, I'll be able to catch up now that Introduction to Genetics and Evolution has finished.

Unfortunately I would need to put a lot of extra time into the astronomy course and it goes a lot faster than I can assimilate the information so it's not possible for me to follow it at the moment.

The drugs and brain course looks like it would have been quite interesting, but I don't have enough background knowledge to really appreciate it so I think I'll come back to it later after I've brushed up on chemistry.

Choosing the Next Course

I'm currently studying two courses, Introduction to Genetics and Evolution, and 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming as the third one I was studying finished last weekend. Next week there are three courses starting that I'm interested in but there is no way I can manage to study five courses while working full time and tutoring on top of that. The courses I'm thinking about taking are the following.

Think Again: How to Reason and Argue (12 weeks, starts 26th November, 5-6 hours per week)
I always find it hard to argue with people and to pinpoint the problems with their argument when they are deflecting or introducing irrelevant topics. I don't trust myself to spot flawed arguments, unless they are mathematical, and I don't want to be an easy target so I think this course could be helpful in providing some enlightenment.

Introduction to Astronomy (9 weeks, starts 27th November, 6-8 hours per week)
I don't know much about astronomy although I've been learning bits and pieces over the last couple of years. I'd like to organise and extend that knowledge.

Drugs and the Brain (5 weeks, starts 1st December, 3-5 hours per week)
From when I was a young child, I wanted to study medicine. When I was 16 I realised that I wasn't clever enough and so I had to give up that dream. Even though the dream couldn't become a reality, the area of medicine still fascinates me. I did a course in Pharmacology a couple of months ago so hopefully the knowledge I gained from that course will be useful for this one.

Decisions, decisions. It's always so hard to choose.

A Year of Courses

Over the past year or so, I've studied quite a few online courses. It surprised me just how many, especially since I started working full time in March. I started quite a few more than this, and then just picked out the ones I liked the best. Some I didn't complete because I didn't like the grading policies, some because they didn't turn out as interesting as I hoped. I have got a certificate from one more but because I didn't really follow it, I don't consider it one I want to add to my list.

For me, this list shows how much you can accomplish without realising it.

Completed

October - December 2011

1. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence which was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig
2. Introduction to Databases which is now at Coursera,taught by Jennifer Widom
3. Machine Learning which is now at Coursera, taught by Andrew Ng

January 2012

4. Open Climate Science 101 taught by David Archer

January - February 2012

5. Fundamentals of Nanoelectronics, Part 1: Basic Concepts taught by Supriyo Datta

February - April 2012

6. Introduction to Computer Science (CS101) Building a Search Engine taught by David Evans
7. Artificial Intelligence (CS373) Programming A Robotic Car taught by Sebastian Thrun (I really could do with going back and doing a little more on this course as I don't feel I got as much from it as I would have liked due to time constraints with work at the time. The course is now self-paced so there is no time limit.)

June - September 2012

8. Vaccines taught by Paul Offit
9. Fundamentals of Pharmacology taught by Emma Meagher

July 2012

10. Power Searching with Google

September - October 2012

11.Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (CS313) Dealing with Challenging Problems taught by Sebastian Wernicke

September - November 2012

12. Learn to Program: The Fundamentals taught by Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries

In Progress:

September 2012 - January 2013

13. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming taught by Eric Grimson, Chris Terman and John Guttag

October - December 2012

14. Introduction to Genetics and Evolution taught by Mohamed Noor

Hypnotism

I went to a talk this evening by a stage hypnotist, Martin Taylor. He does a hypnotism show without hypnotising anyone yet still gets people to do different things. It was interesting to see the similarity between a hypnotist making people fall over and Benny Hinn, a preacher in the USA, slaying people in the Spirit. I saw Benny Hinn at a conference back in the 1990s. That was a different life, one I'm glad to have left behind.

Mussel Mimics Fish

I've just started studying Coursera's Genetics and Evolution course, and in it this video was linked. It shows how a mussel tricks fish into trying to eat it so it can eject its young into the fish's mouth.