i dreamt about scooping cat poop out of the litter.
i was in my old apartment in san francisco, but instead of my roommate, there was a different person who doesn’t correspond to anybody in real life. she performed an amazing feat where she picked up just the poop from one cat litter box and flung it all somehow into my cat litter box (because we had one each, in the living room of my old apartment), which we had agreed on. there was a reason for the transference of the poop location from her litter box to my litter box in the dream, but i can’t tell you what it was now that i’m awake. it made sense while it was happening. i was very impressed that she didn’t get any poop on her hands. i did not use my hands–i used a scoop, just like the one we have in real life in my current apartment bathroom, but the poop kept falling off the side and then falling into the litter more and more, and i kept changing the way i was scooping to avoid smearing it. i really worked hard and for a long time on this project, but i could get none of the poop out. i woke up extremely frustrated and my shoulder was sore. my shoulder was sore because in real life i still have an injured shoulder.
i told my sister this morning during our daily “please get judy out of bed” phone call and she said “i can’t help but attach meaning to this. maybe each piece of poo is another guy who needs an attitude adjustment.” i laughed a lot.
at techtonica this week, i made up an API project so everyone could get experience with data flow from user input in their client, to that data getting put into a POST body in the client while the client is sending a request to their server, to their server handling the request and getting the data out of the body of the request, to the server opening a database connection and using SQL to write that data into the database, to the database saying “yes i wrote it and here is what i wrote,” and that data traveling back to the server and the server stuffing it into their response to the client and then the client grabbing the data out of the body of the response and showing it back to the user. i feel like this is incredibly foundational to what we’re covering in our web dev program (and not just for web development). i am actually extremely proud of how it went.
also yesterday, before they made clients, i asked everyone to make the same request to their brand-new API six different ways:
- Postman (a Mac app that’s a GUI for
curl) -
curlon the command line -
XMLHttpRequestin raw javascript in a javascript console in a browser -
window.fetchin that javascript console (just to see that it returns a promise) -
http.requestin node (it comes with node), in the node repl -
node-fetchin node, again in the node repl but afternpm install --save node-fetchin the client project they were about to work on
then i asked them to use node-fetch in their client and they did! it worked out and i think people were able to get what i wanted them to get out of it, which is an appreciation for what these higher-level libraries give us. lol.
i’m very proud of myself, and i’m also scared because i veered off the curriculum as it’s written, and some people got lost while i was trying to explain the project requirements. but it has worked out and we’ve gotten everyone on the same page. now i’m writing it all down so the next cohort has clear instructions for why we’re doing this project this way.
yesterday night i went to the “empowering womxn of color open mic night” at la peña cultural center in berkeley. it was great.
stuff to acknowledge it as more than passing interest. Or if it is awesome. So… completely useless as a signal to anyone else! 