lennys January 07, 2024

Coding can be frustrating at times...

So I ordered a new Django & React book from Amazon. For some reason it will take 2 weeks to get here, but I'm hoping it will arrive sooner than that. I went through one of my Django books again and got through the API creation part, but I ran into an issue I couldn't figure out, like usual. I emailed the author about it and asked if there was code online I could reference. I haven't heard back yet, so now I'm going through my other Django book again. Building the Django backend and the API is getting easier, but I'm still struggling with JavaScript & React. Hopefully the new book will help with that. Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to get anywhere with all this coding stuff. It sure seems like the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know and can't do. It's frustrating. I talked about this in therapy this week, and now I just have to remind myself every so often that I need to keep working on it, and I'll get somewhere with it eventually. This is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with these feelings for years. At some point I still hope to create a business out of this, but that'll be a while still.

lennys December 28, 2023

Post-Christmas blues

Today is Thursday, and Christmas was just 3 days ago. I spent it at Mom's house in Oregon with Mom & Stepdad plus my brother, his wife and 3 kids. It was a good holiday, but was over too soon like all holidays are. I got some things I wanted and a few items that I didn't know I wanted, plus a few things I needed. The kids had a good time, and I had fun hanging out with everyone. I miss them already. This will be the last time I take any days off for a while. I'll be working on New Years Eve/Day this year, and I have a birthday coming up in about 3 weeks during which I'll also be working, so it's back to the grindstone for me. I finished up a tutorial about Django APIs and React frontends today. I think I've got the Django-end of things covered pretty well, although I still need to work on building APIs for practice, but when it comes to React and JavaScript in general I'm still pretty green. I haven't been able to find a good blog tutorial for Django APIs + React stuff yet, but I'm still looking. I was hoping I'd find a blog tutorial I could work through and eventually adapt to the next iteration of this blog, but that'll have to wait a while I work through this learning curve. When I built this blog, I adapted it from a tutorial I found on YouTube, but now I'd like to build an API that serves as the backend and use React for the frontend. This will enable me to make changes to the frontend of things to accommodate mobile browsers and whatnot without making any changes to the Django backend. I know it's possible, I just have to find a good guide online somewhere and work my way through it. I have a couple of books about building APIs in Django with a React frontend, but they don't cover making a blog in that manner so I'm still looking for something that directly covers it. I have more ideas than I have time it seems.

lennys December 21, 2023

It works!

So I got my new "Contact Us" form working on my main website and on my LS Enterprises site finally. I had worked through a tutorial I found online, but ran into issue after issue, so I tried out a different contact page tutorial I found on mailtrap.io's site (THANK YOU!!), and managed to get it working. So now you can email me by going to either lsenterprises.com/contact/ and filling out the form, or by going to lennyshort.com/contact/ and filling out that form. They're not pretty yet, but I'm satisfied for the moment. Coding blows my mind with all the little details. I would imagine that feeling is rather common among people who do this sort of thing every day, but for a relative novice like me, it's still staggering how much you have to know in order to put a website online start-to-finish like I've done. From getting an AS number from ARIN to setting up a colocation account at the data center to procuring a secondhand server and router and figuring out how to set them up to installing all kinds of software and dealing with the issues that lie therein to the actual coding of the website's backend code to making it look pretty, it's mind-numbing when I try to take all of it in. And I've just scratched the surface so far I think. On a side note, I'm going out to Oregon in a few days for Christmas. My brother is bringing his wife and 3 kids with him so it will be a full house at Mom's this year. I'm looking forward to the change of scenery. I'll be driving a rental car there and back mainly because I don't trust my old truck to make the journey any more. After my birthday comes and goes in January I'll be looking into trading it in on something newer, so I'm looking forward to that too (cautiously). It will be a learning experience for me because I've never bought a vehicle with a trade-in before, plus I'll have to get financing for it. When I bought my first new car years ago I got the financing done through GM which was easy, but this time around I'm hoping to get it financed through my credit union so I can get a better interest rate. We will see.

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