A Brit in California: Road Trippin'

We in the Golden State!

After 5 years of being together, I'd actually never brought the Boy back with me to California until this year. I know, it seems silly that I never have, but I had multiple reasons:

We're Engaged!

The morning after Valentine's Day

The Boy and I have been engaged since Japan, around November 2013, but we didn't have a ring or a traditional and romantic proposal story to tell our friends when we broke the news. So I didn't really announce our engagement in any official way, just telling friends individually as we caught up through the months. 

First post of the year

A quick recap of the new year so far...

I finished my web development course, hooray! 

It totally blew past in a sort of exciting and painful way, but bring it on! Moar! More learning excitement though, maybe I'll feel a bit less pain eventually...

Kuma helping me with my work...not

My sister flew out to spend Christmas with us!

It's been years since we've been able to hang out, just the two of us, and even longer to enjoy Christmas together.

Kuma's first Christmas

Welcome, Kuma-chan!

I have exciting news as we have been searching for a new addition to our home!

My first coding project: 2048

I'm now into week 4 of my web dev boot camp, meaning I'm almost one-third of the way through, crazy!

Honestly, there are times where I feel like there is no possible way that I can be remotely competent in just 12 weeks, but then I saw some student projects from the previous session and it motivates me to remember that they were just like me...and now they have real, working products!

I just uploaded my first working game, which is based on the original 2048 game:

"So you agree? You think you're really pretty?"

Don't be too harsh, it's my first working code as a whole and I didn't focus too much on aesthetics (as you can tell).  I used Mean Girls as a fun theme to motivate me.

If you don't know about it, try it!  It's a simple but effective time-waster.  You're basically trying to combine the same numbers together until you get a 2048 tile on your board.  This hasn't happened for me yet but you have this bright pink version to try it on!

We made this game to learn and understand a bunch of new concepts and be able to use them in a real context and then played around with different effects afterwards.  To summarize:

• This combined HTML5, CSS,  and CoffeeScript (converted to JavaScript)
• The board fades in
• Every time the numbers combine, the background tile image changes
• Every time you hit a new high tile number for the first time, the background image and movie quote change
• The score tally is simple but functional
• Alerts you when 'game over'
• Used two-dimensional arrays to build the board

This project was from two weeks ago (we started it in our second week) so we've already moved on to new topics, but I'm already trying to think of a few different ideas that I'd like to try out in a couple months.  I do have a key topic in mind that I'm really excited about, so hopefully I can put my thoughts together enough to build it.

Hope all is well in the real world!

xx K