Let’s get back and let me tell you a bit about my work again (the actual reason why I’m here by the way). So besides sorting my private stuff out, I actually managed to work and finish some tasks indeed.
Coding is a very good therapy to concentrate yourself on creating and taking your mind off things. There are not really many activities I know, which have this unique property. You can compare it with playing an instrument, solving a riddle or doing sports maybe – but the way, how you get into this notorious „tunnel“, is still unique in my opinion.
My second week started with working and optimizing the new feature for the website, which I started to build on Saturday evening already. I don’t like Javascript itself that much and I don’t like the structure of the language especially, to be honest, but I LOVE the fun things you can create with it. Obviously that much, that I invested some of my free time on Saturday to play around with it! I’d call this special relationship as a typical hate love now – definitely. So let me show you the new feature, which is going to be live with the next merge soon:
What seems so easy at first glance, appeared not that easy retrospectively. There are so many aspects, which you’ve pay attention to it – the design of the button, which you declare at a separate CSS module, the position and at which HTML file (believe me, an usual dynamic website has got tons of it, especially if you’ve different logins/ roles) you’re going to positioned it at and last but not least the appropriate Javascript code, which you’ve to write and integrate. Yup, welcome to the world of front end web development!
But if you thought shortly, that’s it – I’ve to disappoint you unfortunately. There’re even more aspects to care about, if you really want to do it in the professional and fancy way like fading the button in the right moment in and out or changing the style of the cursor, if the user is scrolling over it. But I don’t want to dramatized it that much because if you’ve done it once, it’s going to be very easy to do it another time again. I think this won’t be my last time to integrate such a common feature into my future web projects! So absolutely winning!
On Tuesday I got my next task: to program and integrate a sorting filter feature for the tables on the website. Let me show you again the result of it:
This feature was even way more complicated as the other one. To be exact: It took me four days almost. Overall it took me only two days actually but there was this one „little“ problem, which I got totally stuck to it. The problem was the date format of the two fist columns of the table. The data structure contains a string and number at the same time, which causes problems. After googling ages, I decided to write my own parser function to learn even more at the same time. In the end I solved the problem with some help from my colleague Paul, but the idea and concept was pretty similar, which made me a bit proud to admit. I realize that I understand the concepts much more as a couple of month ago but there is still some practical experience missing to implement those concepts in my mind into a nice and simple code fastly. But skills come with practice and the more I code, the better I become of course! So I’m highly motivated to keep on and not giving up, even I feel super stupid sometimes because often most of the solutions are so simple. So simpel that I can’t prevent to do a proper facepalm and uttering some weird angry sounds! My colleagues find it particularly funny and told me a couple of times that they love this attribute about me. I’m not really sure if I should take this either as a compliment or self-doubt…
Besides this two features, which I was able to finish this week luckily, I had to do little daily business tasks like editing the footer to integrate the phone number with an appropriate phone symbol or editing the font at a different position of the website.
In reward of stressful times, I got a perfect present for the well deserved start of the weekend: The first sunny day and !not rainy day ever! this week. I went to buy some lunch for the first time since I’ve arrived in Belfast and enjoyed it at the notorious and gorgeous Belfast City Hall in the middle of the sunshine (and lots of people):
Of course I don’t want to keep my other super exciting present from you as well, which I gave to one of my best friends and myself two month ago already – an upcoming trip to London from today till Sunday late evening.
So my next blogpost is going to be written in London and probably about London 😉
Suspense continues!