For the last few days I’ve been struggling with a problem in the application I’ve been building that would throw no exception but simply wouldn’t produce the results I expected. When I’m met with a problem like that, it really tests your debugging skills. Why isn’t it producing what I want? Where do I start looking for issues? Is it the view? Is it the model? My approach is to start from the beginning, the Index action in my home controller, and watch the application move from there until the problem occurs. After that, I can jump back to just before it happened and zero in on it.

My application’s purpose is to keep track of the TV Shows a user may be following. The user enters key information about the show, name, genre, number of episodes in total and the number of episodes seen and then the application will display that on the main page. The user can then see at a glance where s/he...

There’s no better way to learn than to throw yourself into the deep end and try and swim. Recently I did just that and started working on an MVC app to get some practice building something from start to finish with as little help from prebaked code on the internet or functioning sites that come as templates with Visual Studio. I couldn’t tell the difference between the empty template and the basic template so I chose the latter in the hopes that I’d avoid having to write the files I don’t understand yet (like the web.config file) but still have to add all the functionality. I had a vague idea for a site I wanted to make so I created the project and began.

I stared at the blank project for at least thirty minutes. Where does one start? My project was to build a site that I could use to keep track of how far I was through the TV shows I was watching. I assumed it would be a simple CRUD...

Web development is still a relatively new field for me. I know my basic HTML elements and structure as well as how CSS works but there are aspects of both that I have yet to learn. Z-index, I thought, was not one of them.

On the surface, z-index seems like quite a simple concept; if an element is positioned, you can give it a z-index and control the stacking order of the element relative to those around it. You can easily stack elements on top of each other and then rearrange the order if you want a different stacking order. It turns out that z-index is more than that, despite its deceptive simplicity which leads many not to read the spec and assume they know how it works. Most of the time, they won’t realise that they don’t fully understand how z-index works because it behaves exactly as they expect. There are cases, however, where changing a seemingly unrelated property will alter the...

My apologies for the delay between posts. Unfortunately, I am in the process of transitioning between jobs and job-searching is mostly all that I’ve been doing. It’s a draining, depressing and unfortunately necessary part of progressing through your career. Fortunately, I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I see Firebootcamp as being my foot in the door and my means of progressing toward an answer to what I would like to do most. Would you look at that, less than a hundred words and already on a tangent. Now, on to the point of this post…

I recently stumbled upon Koding, a site where you can collaborate with others on projects or learn to program in one of several languages all while being able to deploy your apps to a VM where you get root access and storage space you can pool with others for larger projects. It’s a very interesting project and one I hope to use to become more...

Learning is a process of gathering knowledge and accumulating wisdom through doing. Some people absorb knowledge like sponges and apply them with deep insight. Others need to feel the tools in their hands; they cautiously use it in limited contexts, slowly using it for more as they understand the tool more. Through using the tool, they become more comfortable with the use of the tool as well as its function.

I, and I’m sure many others, fall into the latter category. My introduction to programming was very limited. I was thrown in to the deep end of a Fortran 77 stellar evolution program. I started with simply learning how to use the program and later learning how to read it by following the Go To statements. Only after picking up Headfirst C did I start to understand more of the Fortran program I had struggled with. I had accumulated knowledge by reading Headfirst C and wisdom by...

Hello, world, and welcome to my blog! Here I will mostly blog about my experience as a self-taught programmer hoping to make the leap into professional software development. This coming year is going to be an interesting one for me with my current job’s contract expiring in little over a month and hopefully Firebootcamp in September. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide useful information in my posts. Failing that, I hope my posts are entertaining at the very least. I will also try and attach a recent photo I’ve taken to each post just to keep the blog from turning into a wall of text.

A little about myself

I’m a BSc graduate that majored in Astrophysics. In my penultimate year I did a vacation scholarship with a professor of mine whereby I had to compile, execute and make small modifications to a large program that modeled the fusion process within a star. The code was all written in...