Render

10 Mar 2021

I worked on confetti some more today. I refactored a bunch of stuff including the export namespace and core in order to make a lot of those js functions accessible for confetti. Functions like .line-width= and being-path!.

At this point, i have the confetti ‘drawn’, but i still can’t see it. I’ve never really been an awesome troubleshooter–though in the past decade I’ve gotten immensely better at it from when I’d first entered the chemical industry, but I’ve still often needed help to get to the root. I’m also used to working in teams with people who have a lot more experience with me. I mean when a plant goes down or you’ve busted an environmental permit, you don’t sit in your office trying to figure out what happened or how to correct it.

The first thing you do is go ask the person who probably already knows the answer. Over time, you start to learn the things to look for. Software is no different. You must learn the languages and how they work, but there is also a process to both writing as well as troubleshooting the code.

Micah taught me a process a few weeks back when I struggled to troubleshoot something and make it work. It’s important that I’m able to do this. Nonetheless, for the past day or so, I’ve been unsuccessful at getting my confetti to actually display or do anything. It’s clear the functions are either not being called or not outputting anything.

For the past couple of days, i’ve been resorting to old, inefficient (and ineffective) habit of the good-old “guess & check” to no avail.

At the very end of the day, one of my guesses was to just render the whole component–i didn’t like this, but none of my previous trial & error had worked. Then I clicked on render and learned about what it did.

It was then that I’d realized that Micah had shown me how to get over a hurdle like this, and it’s stupidly and embarrassingly obvious–go look at the effing function you are trying to use! Here I am trying to use a function called create-class which takes a map of functions that get called from somewhere, and i didn’t look at the function itself to see how it worked–i just relied on the well-known fact that everything online is true and thus all examples of said function must be correct.

Unfortunately i did this is the last 12 minutes before i was already at the you-were-supposed-to-leave-five-minutes-ago-to-take-rex-to-his-first-day-of-tball point, but i’ll have a good starting point tomorrow–and truth is, I’m probably going to look at it a little more tonight.

I’m frustrated that I didn’t think to do this from the get-go, but that is part of my learning process i suppose. I didn’t do it at all that time before micah showed me to do it. And even though, this time, it took me far too long to realize that’s what I need to do, I still realized it. Next time, I will recognize the struggle sooner. Maybe this is something that should be intuitive. For some reason, it is not.


Rex:
I’m not sure what Rex thought of tball. He enjoyed chasing the ball, and he tried to play with the other kids, but they didn’t always want to play with him. He had fun running the bases and did well at first and second, but ran at a 45* angle outward from third and completely skipped home.

But something was bugging this kid today. All evening he was behaving sad(?). Perhaps he was just tired, but it looked like something was bothering him. I tried to ask him, but all he said was that he didn’t want to go to bed.
Rex playing tball

Leo:
Leo at sand at tball practice…
Sandy Rex & Leo