VS.
My best friend was a nanny for a couple years. One of her charges — the youngest, about 7 — used “versus” as a verb. As in, “I want Optimus Prime to versus Megatron”. Or “I want to versus you in chess.” In the spirit of “versus”, here are some comparisons and competition/ game-related thoughts.
JavaScript vs CSS
My favorite analogy for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML so far is a sentence. HTML is the nouns, CSS the adjectives, and JavaScript the verbs. In this way, CSS tells your browser how things should look and JavaScript tells your browser to do things. They are similar in their form: they’re rules, they read from top to bottom and left to right, they require specific syntax. I find the syntax for CSS much easier to learn, and perhaps that’s because I find it easier to imagine. It’s easy to imagine the color, border, or width of an object. It’s less easy to imagine the action of a click and the resulting return (and all that goes into that).
Dungeons and Dragons
Some people took up crafting during quarantine. I purged my crafts drawers (turns out I am not into mosaics, regardless of the bags of broken ceramics I kept for more than a decade) and started playing Dungeons and Dragons.
In Dungeons and Dragons, the player creates a character and plays the game as the character they create. Characters have a race, class, alignment, etc. that guide what that character can do and what they’re like. Similarly, elements in the DOM have properties and methods that are inherent to their being, which a developer employs to create their website. Developers decide which elements to put on a page, then use properties and methods to make the elements play nicely together (or fight!).
Easy vs Difficult
Grid came so naturally. Sure, it still takes me a while to play around with it to make it work, but I “get it”. I was actually a little surprised to find a classmate with more experience than me was having a hard time wrapping their head around it. This is how I experienced the first 17 years of my schooling — not understanding how difficult some things are for other people when I find them easy. It took me until I was actually in the field of special education for it to “click” that people really do learn differently. So I’m thankful I “get” grid.
My later education is what helps me give myself grace when things like Javascript are not so easy. It’s like long-division in 4th grade or my first week of 9th grade math as 8th-grader. It’s not the JavaScript, itself, that’s difficult. It’s my uncertainty and not understanding the first time that are difficult. I would not have been able to do this as an undergrad 20 years ago. I thought I was a good learner, but it turns out I was just lucky. I didn’t struggle in school, so now I’m learning to struggle. Which makes me a better-than-lucky learner.
Web Developer vs Behavior Analyst
As a behavior analyst, I have found myself getting very creative about collecting data. Most recently, I snuck onto the back of a school bus, through the emergency door, to covertly observe a student’s refusal behavior.
Event listeners seem like a much easier version of this. I can use event listeners to make a computer recognize that you’ve clicked a button and respond to you. They can monitor user behavior, take data, and even act on that data. That’s certainly easier than sneaking on a bus and much easier than training staff to implement a behavior plan. My understanding is so limited at this time, that I don’t even know what I don’t know. I know about onclick, which is pretty much what it sounds like. I know about mousemove, which I assume is the method being used to monitor some employees’ at-home work behavior (a really crappy way to measure employee behavior, says me, the behavior analyst, but I digress). My knowledge is equivalent to a new behavior analyst understanding that you can use preferred activities (like staying up late) to reward appropriate behavior (like getting ready for bed), which is really the quality-baby-sitter level of behavior analyst. Yeah, that’s where I am: baby-sitter is to behavior analyst as I am to web developer.
Let’s Go Buffalo!
If you heard that in your head to the tune of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, you might be a Buffalo Bills fan.
Today, I’m motivated by football. The big motivator, though, is family. The NFL schedule comes out tonight, and we just found out that the Buffalo Bills play the Steelers at home in week one. I turned to my husband and said, “Let’s stay an extra week and go to the game!”
Let me back up a minute. My husband and I live in Austin, TX, more than 3,000 miles from Western NY, where we grew up and still have lots of family. About a decade ago, we finally were able to find the work/ life balance and make it a priority to visit his family each year at a camp in the Adirondack mountains (where his family has been going for nearly 50 years). The week we go to camp is always the week before Labor Day. The first week of the NFL always starts the week after Labor Day. Hence, my (joking) suggestion we stay an extra week and go to the game.
Recently, we’ve been wondering, “Why can’t we spend summers up north with family and winters down in Austin with friends who are like family?” (It actually went more like, “Could we move back north?” to which he replied, “You couldn’t live without [your two best friends who live here in Austin]”. He’s right. Also, why live in the snow if we don’t have to?) The reality is, this is exactly why I’m in this class. In order for us to live in two places, I need remote work. I’ve always had a career I care about, and I don’t want that to change.
I don’t want just a remote job, I want a remote career. I was curious about web development, and started to play around a bit. I found an app that was way above my head and/ or really crappy, then decided I must be really dense so I tried an app aimed at kids, before I finally found one that I actually like (but I digress, again). I started an asynchronous boot camp. The first time I made something appear in a browser using HTML, I got chills. When I started using CSS, I felt like the king of the world — mwahahaha I can make things fuschia! I was ridiculously excited, and honestly, the excitement has not stopped. This is something I can do well, can care about, employs my creativity and critical thinking, and will ultimately become my second career. Because family. And the Bills.