Unit 11 Blog—My Changing Perspective

I feel like I have been drinking LAMP/Command Line the Kool-Aid. When I first started this class, I knew the command line was powerful, and I knew the tools encompassed by LAMP were useful, but I didn’t think that they were things that I would really use or work with. At this point, I feel like I could have a future working with digital collections in a more hands-on way than I originally imagined. It’s a rush, getting scripts and queries to work.

I am a self-taught knitter and crocheter, and teaching myself how to use LAMP with these tutorials felt very similar to teaching myself how to knit. At first, the methods seem unwieldy and feel like you’ll never get the hang of them. After working for a few weeks, I feel like I can create simple things, but I know it’s going to take a lot more practice before I produce something elaborate.

A few reflections about this week’s assignments:

I experienced a setback when I misread page 12 of the lecture, which made me think that imputing the code correctly caused a failure that I was supposed to identify for myself before moving on. In actuality, the failure image was right after the page break. I spent a frantic 10 minutes messing with the MySQL monitor on my server, rereading guides, and flipping back through stuff from as early as Unit 9 before I realized I didn’t have a failure in my code.

Other than that, this week was pretty smooth sailing. I got 100% on the quiz on my first try, which was awesome!

I also wanted to mention I tool that I have been using that has been helpful. It’s called Text Wrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/).  My brother was a Computer Science minor and I inherited his old MacBook Pro when he upgraded his laptop. The computer came to me with Text Wrangler on it. I have been using Text Wrangler to write my code and have found it really helpful because it catches when you don’t match parenthesis and quotes, and it recognizes different tags and turns them a different color (example below). For a visual person like myself, the color coding has been immensely helpful. According to its website, Text Wrangler can be used to do more powerful and complex things, but I found the tag color-coding to be immensely helpful.

(part of the Unit 11 exercises done in Text Wrangler)