It’s the end of the week, a project week, a project week-eeeennnnd! (Wong Fu Productions reference.) Today is Friday, 23rd September 2016, week 6 of the intense 12-week GA web development course. Each of us have just completed a full-stack web app—the first for many of us including me—and presented…

Our instructor, Jeremiah, illustrating the relationship between the client, server, and database in a web project Once you’re over a certain age, enough knowledge of how the world works will be stored in your memory. That knowledge can then serve as the basis from which to draw parallels to other…

Coding is just a means to an end. Unless you’re using programming languages as a medium of art or doing computer science research, there is no good reason to get romantically involved with your code. It’s best to not get overly attached to the (idea of) code but instead, focus on what the code is…

I had an interesting conversation with a programmer yesterday about programming. Halfway through our conversation about how much complexity we have to handle when writing programmes, she said something that captivated me: “my friend is a very experimental programmer”. How fascinating! In my short…

As a user, it used to be hard for a website to impress me. I see certain features here and others there, and after a while, I get a good idea of what is possible and is usually practiced, and that guides my behaviour on the web. I’d expect that hitting ‘enter’ will submit a login form. Now, I’m much…

Going to lunch Here’s a real example from class today. My code is significantly longer than my friend’s. To be honest, I also feel like his code is better than mine in many ways. One of the most significant is the fact that it is more succinct and doesn’t declare any non-crucial variables. His code…

Chinatown Ever wondered why Mozilla Developer Network’s documentation often include a , like Array.prototype.push()? I did, for a long time, and today the veil was lifted for me. It’s a great concept. So, what’s the difference between and ? Functionally speaking, they are exactly the same. Both…

Week three is officially over. Everyone in class has completed their first big coding project and presented it to everyone else. Mine is here. It has been a great week! Steady… steady… oh crap! Having had prior experience coding simple projects (on Free Code Camp), I thought this week would require…

Have you seen a document full of code recently? Your answer is either “Yeah, too many” or “Nope, can’t remember the last time I saw a coder friend coding” - it’s probably not something in between. This duality probably has something to do with the total non-existence of programming in most school…

As JavaScript code is being executed by the browser, the value stored in variables change dynamically. When a user clicks on a button on a page, for example, a block of code (usually a function) gets executed. In a typical programme, executing a function will make use of the computer’s ability to…

Projects that I’m used to working on are entrenched in structures (as in structure versus agency) that inevitably hold me back from full expression. Say I’m trying to run an environmental awareness campaign. To pull it off I’d need to bend to the rules, protocols of the organisations that we have to…

The label ‘digital nomad’ exists because people whose job was to write programmes have become so fluid in the workplace that they can work from virtually anywhere in the world on the single, simple condition that there is an internet connection. With Dropbox as ubiquitous as it is nowadays, it might…

Week 1 at GA Singapore is trying to get the very basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript Whenever learning something new, start with the basics. Web programming has become a mature enough industry to have its own set of community-made tools that purport to help make coding easier, but it’s a mistake to…

I think every aspiring programmer gets extremely excited when they create their first game. No, just me? Huh… It’s my first weekend at General Assembly as a web development student, and as a gift, our loving instructors told us to create our first game - the classic Tic Tac Toe. Present this task to…

In class at General Assembly Singapore With the advent of affordable personal computers came a defeatist belief that “we can never beat the machines” in terms of memory and processing power. A computer’s ability to download information into its “brain” is stupendous compared to a human’s, limited by…

Image: Mike Wilson A cool advantage of being in the habit of writing everyday is that you will become inclined to ask, every single day, “What did I learn today?” Having written every day for almost one and a half months now, I never accept “nothing” as an answer anymore. It’s just impossible to not…

A bug. That’s what we call the bits of our code that don’t work as we, the programmer, intend. When a programme is “buggy” it means it works some times and doesn’t at others. There can be all kinds of ramifications when a company puts a buggy (software) product on the market, from loss of trust to…

I’m going to keep this post short because I think tonight’s homework is going to take over 3 more hours… Yesterday was day 1 of our web development immersive course at General Assembly Singapore. I found ourselves off to a slow start. Perhaps someone from the instructional team had read my blog…

What our classroom looks like from the inside. Michelangelo said this of marble: inside every block lies a sculpture to be discovered. All it needs is for its edges to be carved off. I like to think that I’m my own sculptor, trimming the excess to make the whole coherent, compact and beautiful. Alas…

Before today I was trained as an environmental and social scientist. Knowledge of the complex issues that are ongoing around us and around the world is helpful, but without so much as a hint of an ability to actually try to solve these problems has made me increasingly uneasy. I didn’t and still don…