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Hacker School Day 12, Day 13 Combo – All Nighter

I’m nearing hour 36 of an accidental prolonged all-nighter, which is my defense for a copout combo post. I ended up working until 1AM, decided I didn’t want to take the train home, and paired with Pedro Tacla Yamada and Nicholas Chammas instead. Then it was 5AM and I was past the tired point. Yesterday was just me running head first into the Javascript wall. According to my search history and git commits, yesterday went like this:

  • before 10AM: look up some more information about RESTful design and long poll jobs. Convince myself I’m totally wrong in my currently implementation (I am!)
  • up to 12PM: look up more information about JCrop, the library I decided on using for getting the bounding square for the example frontend to demonstrate my Youtube to Gif converter API
  • up to 1PM: look up docs on DoubleSlider, the JS library I chose to create a slider to let the user select a time range for the GIF.
  • look up Bill Cosby YouTube videos. Youtube-Gif-Go logs don’t show any attempts at converting these.
  • 2PM: realize DoubleSlider relies on other libraries.
  • up to 5PM: talk with other Hacker Schoolers about APIs and interesting projects.
  • Angrily and somewhat wildly looking up information about setInterval and everything else listed above. A search for the UTF-8 designed in the NJ Diner story to send to other Hacker Schoolers.
  • Generating every set from the array {‘force’, ‘youtube’, ‘buffer’, ‘javascript’} and feeding it into Google.
  • 10PM: Spend a bunch of time finding just the right gradient of white into slightly greyer white.
  • Midnight: attack swfobject with everything I can in order to be able to crop. JCrop won’t attach, and divs aren’t helping. Try and fail with html2canvas even though it looks super cool.
  • Up to 2AM: Pedro and Nicholas begin to help me absolutely position the div to let JCrop work. Start to stitch the JCrop code in.
  • Up to 3AM: Add a text field that checks input for valid Youtube URLs and updates the page with a player with that URL. Decide that I should probably be tracking this “one-off example API consumer” in git.
  • Up to 5AM: Talk with Pedro and Nicholas about interesting projects using Docker and QEMU. Videos can be cropped and posting these coords to the API works.
  •  It doesn’t actually work because I forgot about CORS. Fix that. Play with CSS.
  • 8AM: Decide that it would be cool to make the example app provide an option to upload the GIF to gfycat instead of working on a video loop. The gfycat API is refreshingly easy to use.
  • Be sad about the diagonal line that my code has become and try to tease out callbacks. Laugh because the Wikipedia article on Sleep Deprivation includes an image that lists “severe yawning” as an effect.
  • 10AM: Look at spinners a lot. Think about why it’s so hard to add a vertical line to Bootstrap.
  • 11AM Eat lunch
  • Think about Javascript and do more CSS twiddling. Test making tons and tons of GIFs. Worry about rate-limiting.
  • 2PM: Begin to run JSHint/JSLint and eventually install node on my laptop so I can run it locally. Fix hundreds of semicolon problems.
  • 3PM: Pair with Agustin Diaz, who then goes on to give me the most comprehensive JS breakdown I’ve ever seen. Learn tons, make notes to improve code, and talk about Javascript in general.
  • 6PM: Trivia night is coming! Try to nap but I’m ENERGIZED.
  • 7PM: Time for trivia.

I could list a mountain of things that I need to fix in the API and the example consumer, but instead I’ll leave you with this:

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