learning – Page 5 – Rebekah Heacock Jones

This Week I Learned (2016-05-18)

Pugs!

More than I ever knew I wanted to know about pugs, including that Joséphine de Beauharnais, who married Napoléon Bonaparte, used her pug to carry secret messages out of prison.
You can check out sheet music from the Minuteman Library Network! My piano playing skills are about to get a workout.
Today is the Queen’s Speech! It takes place as part of the State Opening of Parliament, which involves ritualized banging on doors with a black rod, a hostage, and a candlelit search of the Palace of Westminster cellars. tl;dr Britain is weird
The word contronym. See: nonplussed, cleave, rent, consult, dust, seed, sanction, and all of English’s other most frustrating words.

This Week I Learned (2016-05-10)

I’m better at adding things to my #TWIL file in Simplenote than I am at actually blogging about them.

I’m better at adding things to my #TWIL file in Simplenote than I am at actually blogging about them.
If an input field’s font size is >= 16px, phones won’t automatically zoom in when a user focuses on the field.
Closures, via the JavaScript class I’m taking this semester, Preethi Kasireddy’s article in the freeCodeCamp channel on Medium, and the MDN reference. Key ideas so far: “an important use of closures: to maintain a private reference to a variable in the outer scope”; “you can use a closure anywhere that you might normally use an object with only a single method.”
In 1915, the New York Philharmonic had to issue a public notice asking concertgoers to refrain from knitting during the performance.
How to get data from the Digital Public Library of America API: particularly proud of this one because I helped write and edit this API’s documentation several years ago as part of my role as the senior project manager for the DPLA at the Berkman Center. I used it to build DPLA Images, an interface for searching the library for image records.

This Week I Learned (2016-03-23)

JavaScript, landscaping, and Dutch babies.

Batching several weeks’ worth of learning into a single post because I was too busy having fun in Kansas (*happy dance, again*) to post.

The difference between prototypical and class-based object oriented programming languages (at least at a surface level): objects in prototypical languages (like JavaScript) are derived from other objects, and can become prototypes for other objects. In class-based languages (like PHP), you define a class, and then create objects that are instances of that class.
- At an immediate, practical level, this means that you can create a new namespace in JavaScript by defining a new object (compare this to defining a namespace in PHP).
Inside a JavaScript constructor function, variables and functions declared directly are private. Variables and functions declared using this are public (or privileged—see Douglas Crockford’s “Private Members in JavaScript” for more).
In JavaScript, innerHTML can’t be appended—you can use += to append new content, but the end effect is to rewrite/reload all content within innerHTML on the page, rather than to tack on new material.
JavaScript has 12 types of nodes. Each has a number. Elements are 1, text nodes are 3.
The global context in JS is (in web browsers) the window object.
I liked this history of JavaScript (and JScript and ECMAScript).
I’m looking forward to installing a few of these Sublime Plugins—I use Bracket Highlighter and Color Highlighter all the time, and I have Emmet installed but keep forgetting to use it. SublimeCodeIntel and AdvancedNewFile sound particularly helpful.
How to tear down a deck, what a tiller is and how to use it, and how to lay weed barrier fabric: much landscaping work was done in Kansas last week.
Lunch at Blue Nile in Kansas City’s City Market last week reminded me that I need more Ethiopian food in my life.
You can totally make a Dutch baby in a 9×13 pan. Wishing I had known this for the 26 years of life when I didn’t own a cast iron skillet.

This Week I Learned (2016-03-09)

HackerRank, Belize, and coffee in Kansas.

I’ve been playing around with HackerRank a lot this week, and as I result I’m becoming more familiar with a wider set of functions (things like array_sum() and substr_replace()). Programming languages are languages, and this is a good way to drill vocab.
$array[] = $value; is the same as array_push($array, $value)
It’s entirely possible to book a trip to Belize with a few clicks: tickets and beachside bungalow were secured in a matter of minutes today.
Kansas City apparently has quite the coffee scene. Looking forward to checking it out this weekend when I go to Kansas (*happy dance*).
I finished all of Mystery Show’s first season last week and am now getting into the Myths & Legends podcast. Favorite episode so far: Thor’s fake wedding to a giant.

This Week I Learned (2016-03-03)

SASS and Mystery Show.

Not much—I was sick all week and spent most of my time sleeping/migraine-ing/coughing.

I did experiment with SASS, though—I’d dabbled a bit previously, but not seriously. Verdict: four stars.

I also discovered Mystery Show, Starlee Kine’s podcast on solving mysteries that are less true crime, more “how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal?” It’s excellent.