DEV Community: Jerry L. Glammeier, Jr.

Life Balance as a Beginner Dev

Jerry L. Glammeier, Jr. — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 19:00:22 +0000

I recently went through a web development coding boot camp with Vets Who Code. If you were to look at my code it would be pretty obvious that I am new to coding. With that being said, I realized early that there are so many things in my life trying to prevent me from learning to code and building on this new passion that I am growing to love. Being a hands on husband and a father of 4, there are obstacles all over that hinder my time for learning.

With my new world of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, GraphQL and so on, finding adequate time to build the knowledge of everything I have learned from this boot camp can be a struggle at times. This has opened my eyes, my mind, and forced me to be creative when it comes to squeezing in time to do all that I can to help ease this learning process.

How busy am I?

My day consists of getting up about 3:15am and off to the ferry by 4:10am (being from the Seattle area). I have a one and a half hour commute to and from work (when traffic is good). Then I usually get to bed about 10pm if all goes as planned which usually it is closer to 10:30pm. This seems like a lot of time but when you add family into the mix along with over time at work, I rarely get any "me" time, let alone quality time to study which usually starts 16-18 hours into my day (thanks coffee).

Where Do I Have Time?

Figuring out where I can squeeze in my learning so that the quality is still beneficial, is kind of a magic trick. I know that the most important time of the day is when I am at home and I need be online to do my assignments and projects. So I start looking at other times of the day like work and commute.

Thanks to the industry I currently work in, I am able to wear headphones while working. So, at work I listen to podcasts like Syntax, Learn To Code With Me, JavaScript Jabber to start. In a nine or ten hour day I can listen to eight plus hours of podcasts. After listening for a while, I realized that this would only help me out so much because even taking notes here and there, I would not be able to follow their coding examples.

Then there are YouTube tutorials. If I was able to watch videos during my commute, I would have more time for my homework (which is needed from time to time when there are issues with something working - Gatsby...) and coding practice. So, I downloaded the videos that I would watch on the ferry.

In Conclusion

I know that everyone has a million excuses not to see something through. But, as a father, a husband and someone that loves to help people in general, it is hard to pull myself from them to do something that is so enjoyable for me to do and can eat up 4-5 hours easily, especially during this learning phase. I cannot wait to get an opportunity to do this full time because I can only imagine the amount of things I will learn. Most of these distractions are just life. Some people are busier than others and most times people figure out what needs to be done or just find a way to work through it.

The best part of this post is that it was done at work during a 10 hour shift on a Saturday, while helping out a coworker who was overwhelmed with his workload.

The trifecta....

Loops in JavaScript

Jerry L. Glammeier, Jr. — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 18:20:55 +0000

While going through the Vets Who Code coding bootcamp we were introduced to loops, mainly for loops. It was not until I completed the cohort and started digging deeper into JavaScript and learning more through books and podcasts that I actually found out there were more to loops that just the for loop. In this article I will be giving an overview of the loops and statements that work with them and how they are used. Maybe in a later article I will dig even deeper into this subject.

While the for loop is used to repeat something until the statement is false, some of the statements used in conjunction with loops are:

continue
do....while
for...in
for...of
labeled
while

The break loop is used to terminate a loop or switch the loop when it is used with a labeled statement.

The Continue loop is used to restart the do...while, for, label and while statements.

The do...while statement repeats until a condition returns false.

The for...in statement through the properties of an object.

The for...of statement through the value of iterable objects.

The label statement utilizes a statement which you can break out of code block with a break statement or a continue statement.

The while statement executes a statement as long as the statement is true.

With this just touching the surface of loops and iterations, it was more than I was aware of or had time to dig into while in the bootcamp. From here on out I just look forward to finding the time to dig deeper into more and more subjects to keep my learning process going.

Computer Shortcuts to Speed Up Production

Jerry L. Glammeier, Jr. — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:35:34 +0000

Weather you are a normal everyday computer user or you are writing code 10 hours a day there are simple computer shortcuts that can either speed up your production or just make it easier.

As an avid computer hobbyist for over 20 years now, I did not find most of these shortcuts to really help me until about 10 years ago. At first they seem to take up more time getting used to them than they were really beneficial, but when you start to implement several together they all add up and you see a difference.

For the most part there are numerous shortcuts that are implemented cross platform. And by cross platform for me I mean from Windows to Linux along with the programs that are ran in them. I personally am not a Mac guy, by enlarge due to Linux. If I feel the need to run a Mac specifically, I save some money and run Linux. But most of these apply to Mac's using the command key.

Some of the basic and very common examples are:

Ctrl + c to cut Ctrl + f find or search for something Ctrl + o open a file Ctrl + v to paste Ctrl + p to print Ctrl + s to save Ctrl + Shift + s to save as Alt + Tab to scroll windows forward Alt + Shift + Tab to scroll windows backward

Now you have some that are more program specific. What I am finding out while learning to code is that I am having to switch browser tabs or browser windows to research the things that I am trying to create. Some of the shortcuts within Chrome (since most dev's use Chrome) are:

Ctrl + Tab to scroll tabs forward Ctrl + Shift +Tab to scroll tabs backward Ctrl + n to open a new window Ctrl + Shift + n open a new Incognito window Ctrl + t to open a new tab and go to it Ctrl + e or k to go to the search bar

Another one that I use quite a bit in Chrome is Alt key. When you see that you have a spelling mistake (shown by a red underlined squiggly), all you have to do is hover over the word and press the Alt key and left click your mouse and it will give you suggestions. This is very handy when I know what I want to say and there are multiple spellings of a word but I am not sure exactly which one I should use.

Just the the cut and paste while writing can be huge. How I implement my shortcuts is I have a main window open in Chrome that I work on. Then I open another window to do my research, even though I love my tab browsing and usually have about a dozen tabs open at any given time. I do this because it is easier for me to hit Alt + Tab to jump back and forth between windows than than Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go back and forth in tabs. Basically it is due to the number of keys needed to be pressed, which is only two as opposed to remembering to use three keys to go back.

Some more convenient ones that might not be used as often are:

Ctrl + d adds a bookmark Ctrl + h opens history Ctrl + j opens downloads Ctrl + Shift + o opens bookmarks Ctrl + w closes current tab and take you to the last one Ctrl + u view source in a full page

While writing this article I found a couple more shortcuts that I was not aware of that I will be using more in the future. Just to sit down and try some of these out might be a big time saver for you .

Doing a Google's search you can find shortcuts for anything. I thought I would just put this together to show there are some very useful ones that are worth trying out.

Bootable USB to try Linux

Jerry L. Glammeier, Jr. — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 03:56:26 +0000

Many years ago I was very intrigued when I found out that you can run a computer with an operating system from a CD/DVD, all while not touching the hard drive or even needing the hard drive. Today this done using a USB drive which runs much faster than an optical drive thanks to USB 3.1.

How this works is the computer loads the OS from the thumb drive and creates a virtual hard drive in RAM. So, instead of it running the operating system from the hard drive, it runs from a partition in RAM. The best part is when things start acting unusual all you have to do is reboot and start over or try a different version of Linux. I use this to tryout or test different programs to see which ones I like or work for the application I need like Atom. After I find what I want I reboot to clean the ones I don't.

This is done with a tool called Yumi from www.pendrivelinux.com. Yumi is a Windows based tool that allows you to install Linux distributions on there based on the space of the USB. It will also allow you to change the distributions without having to redo the entire USB.

After downloading Yumi and running it from Windows, the best place to download Linux distributions is www.distrowatch.com. This website has years of Linux distros logged on file from Arch Linux to UBUNTU, all the way back to 2001 which was pretty close to when I started visiting this site. One of the first distros I started with was a credit card distro called DSL or Damn Small Linux due to it being about 200MB and it was able to fit on a credit card size CD. Thanks to to my 56k dial up modem, it was one of the easiest ones to download but still took almost an hour.

Once you have a Linux distro on the USB you need to be able to boot from it. Some computers require you to change the BIOS settings, while others are capable of temporarily changing the boot option with a function key. If you Google your PC for alternate boot options it will tell you if a function key will allow you to boot your computer.

If you did all that you should be up and running with Linux. A lot of people are intimidated by Linux because they think it is 100% terminal based but tend to be surprised it is actually GUI (graphical user interface) based. My distro of choice is KNOPPIX. This distro is not for the faint of heart due ot the tools it comes with but for the most part the basic stuff is like Windows. I love to use it for troubleshooting PC's and networks along with everyday internet surfing.