
Hello!

Welcome to James Calingo’s blog version x.0!

I’ve tried having SEVERAL blogs in the past, and while I had varying amounts of “success” with them, they all kinda fell by the wayside.

So what makes this one different from them?

While I can’t guarantee that there will be consistently be content here, I can safely say that this one represents a major shift from the other blogs I’ve had.

Why? Because I built it 100% from scratch.

To give some context as to why that’s important for me, let me delve a bit into my blogging history.

My first blog was on tumblr WAY back in the day. For those of you who are too young to remember tumblr, it was a popular site in the late 2000s where people made “blogs” about things. I use quotations there because while tumblr was technically a blogging site, content was mainly just “someone makes a popular post and then everyone just reblogs it” (think modern day Twitter without the character limit). Technically, tumblr IS still around, but unless I’m mistaken it’s WAY less popular these days (partly due to a change in their content policy involving…the art people usually posted).

Then, I moved on to WordPress, using that for several years through college and then a few years after that. When I started learning how to code, however, I realized that if I was to become a developer, then it might be a good idea to move away from WordPress and move towards something else. Yes, I know WordPress is still widely used, but I feel like I have a lot more control over my blog this way.

My last blog, which features a grand total of twelve posts, was the first time I had tried making my own blog using my own coding skills.

Here’s the thing, though: it was essentially a copy of something else. I found it when trying to find a “tutorial” for making a blog, and while it was nice having more control over the whole thing, I’ve always wanted to try building the entire thing on my own. There's also another reason that I wanted to do this, but it's a bit weird: that blog was forked from something, and for whatever reason, whenever it updated, the updates were not reflected on my GitHub.

…And that’s where this site comes in. It’s something I’ve built from the ground up.

Mostly.

This blog is largely based on [this tutorial I found online](https://www.kalopilato.com/blog/how-to-build-and-deploy-your-personal-blog-with-next-js). Unlike the last version, however, this one involved me writing all of the code myself (minus copying a few RegEx things).

If you’re reading this on the day it comes out, odds are that things here look a little…rough. That’s largely because I finished a lot of the HTML/JS last Friday and was kinda busy this past weekend, so I haven’t really had time to get into the “nitty gritty” of CSSing this thing. That will come soon, however, and hopefully it'll be good (unlike a lot of people, I actually kinda like doing my own CSS)

If you’re wondering about when I’ll be updating this, I don’t think giving a hard answer is really that great of an idea. My HOPE is at least once a week, but we’ll see how much I can keep that up.

That's enough for now I feel. Talk to you soon!


Where I introduce something I've already introduced in the past.

Hello World...Again!


This is a draft of a post that was originally to be posted in March 2022. I'm not really sure why I never posted it (or why I mentioned McDonalds), but it was intended as a quick update on what I was doing at the time:

> *It sure has been a while since I updated this.*
>
> *I'd love to tell you that it's because I spent the better part of the last few months trekking across the vastness that is North America, visiting the West Coast, Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, Deep South, Canada, and seeing how many McDonalds I run into along the way...*
>
> *...But that would be false - and also probably something I would never think to do with highly contagious COVID floating around. Instead...I just never really updated this blog. I had some ideas for posts, and they may come to fruition soon, but the last few months were me focusing on learning and the job hunt...*
> 
> *...and then I got a job.*
>
> *Yes, the thing that this blog was intended for ended up happening without the assistance of this blog - if that makes sense.*
>
> *Honestly, it caught me by surprise. I didn't even apply for my job - someone from the company found me on LinkedIn, sent me a message, and then a few interviews later I was hired.*
>
> *So what now?*

> *Well...I'm not sure. As you may expect with a developer job, I'm usually busy with code all day. However, due to some...circumstances, I'm currently the only U.S. based dev at my company.*
> 
> *I will, however, try and update this blog somewhat.*

So what brings me back to my blog today?

Well...things have happened since then, the biggest one of which is the fact that __I am no longer at the job I mentioned here__.

I won't get into what happened or why I left said job here - maybe at a future time.

So the big thing, in my mind, is this: what's next for me? 

For starters, I'm looking for work. I'd like a new job sooner rather than later (for MANY reasons), so I know I need to be on that ASAP (though that's been a bit more difficult than I had anticipated - I'll get into that soon).

As for this blog, I'd like to get back into a somewhat regular posting schedule. I don't know exactly what that would be, but I'm hoping for at least one post a week.

I'm not sure how exactly to end this, but like I said, I'll try and update again soon.

Oh hai bloggy


One of the biggest challenges about blogging: coming up with ideas for content. However, I figure that since I'm currently in job hunting mode, I'd discuss this:

What was I going to do with this blog?

I do have a TON of drafts saved in my Notes app (and on Google Docs), but in my attempt to "tell the harsh truths" about trying to get a job in the software market, I ponder if some of my thoughts may have been too harsh.

Yes, there's a lot of Chicken Little-ism amongst students of both bootcamps and colleges right now - layoffs, downsizings, AI, and the ever-looming spectre that is the economy make it feel like "getting in" is impossible now. I'd argue that the reality is that getting in is more difficult than most people seem to anticipate, but it is possible.

...Unfortunately, the sheer volume of prospective candidates has shifted the goalpoasts quite far back. Realistically, there's no easy way to solve this, and the potential "solutions" for this could easily be (and, in some cases, have been) harmful to those currently in the industry.

However, we're in September, and traditionally, hiring picks up for a little bit, so now is an opportune time for job seeking (which is what I'm currently doing).

Anyway, back to the original question: this blog.

I'm pretty sure it's largely going to be "variety" content. Sometimes it'll be thoughts on the tech industry, sometimes it'll be stuff I've learned so I can make sure I actually know what's going on, and other times it'll be completely random. In any case, I hope it'll be employable...I mean enjoyable (why did I do that). 

The first of what should be weekly updates

September's First


One of the big things I've realized in the past week:

The way forward is important. 

I know that sounds obvious, but what I'm trying to figure out is what exactly "the way forward" is - especially as it pertains to job seeking.

I was never really a fan of trying to "spray and pray" applications, and with the market the way it is, it seems likely that trying to "spray and pray" is merely an invitation to exhaust yourself for no gain.

Of course, if you're not going to "spray and pray", then that means that you have some form of a strategy in mind - which I do...for the most part.

I know I need to start working that strategy into motion now.

I'm still figuring out how.

Forward


In my never ending quest to learn as many of the things as I can (within reason), I like to try doing small projects to see how I do with them. 

This time, I decided to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while: a simple game.

The “Psychic game”, as I call it, is one of the first “real” programming things I did in a coding bootcamp back in the day. The idea is that a letter is randomly selected from the alphabet, and the player has to guess which letter. You can check out my original (HTML/JavaScript) version [here](https://jamescalingo.dev/PsychicGame), complete with probably-inspired-by-Chandler-Bing pithy comments that are probably not necessary at all (RIP Matthew Perry).

Many moons ago, I did a Python version of it inspired by something I saw on LinkedIn. After I finished that, I even attempted to do a version in Rust using the Rust book’s tutorial for a number game (I haven’t gotten it past that point, however, because Rust is not a great beginners language). However, there’s one language that I’d been meaning to check out that I hadn’t yet: Go.

Until last Friday.

I decided to try making the game in Go to see how I would do with a 100% blank slate: No guides, no tutorials - just googling things and trying them out to see what stuck.

Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about the process of doing this. I’m going to be a bit broad about this because I think it's better for those learning coding to see a broader picture of what it is rather than specifics.

**STEP 1: Identify the pieces you need**

The first thing you need is a “platform”, if you will, to play the game on. Yes, you’re playing this on a computer, but the “how” is what I’m trying to talk about here. This is part of why HTML/JavaScript are popular for newcomers: there’s a super easy way to see code work because it runs (almost) natively in the browser. Go, on the other hand, isn’t natively supported by most web browsers, so I had to find something else to run the game in, and that something is known as a command line interface. I won’t get too deep into what that is, but if you’re using a Mac, it’s the Terminal program (I know there are equivalents for Windows and Linux, but I’m not sure what they’re known as).

Next, you need the letters and a way of selecting one of them. Typically, you’d use an array with all the letters of the alphabet - preferably in one case for VERY IMPORTANT reasons I’ll get into in a sec (I typically use lower). Generally, you’d want to use an array that contains the 26 letters of the alphabet, but I believe some languages would let you use a string if you so chose (though I’d argue an array is easier for multiple reasons).

You also need some way of selecting a random letter from said array. Thankfully, some programming languages (or at least the ones I’ve used save for maybe SQL) come with a way to generate random numbers, and thus make the randomization part of this game quite trivial.

The last few things you need for this are, like the number randomizer, generally standard with most languages: ways to guide the player via print statements, ways to accept player input (more on this later because Go does something rather unique in this regard), ways to tell the program what to do based on the guess (i.e. if statements), and a way to “run” the game, so to speak, which brings me to…

**STEP 2: Design the game loop**

 When a player inputs a guess, one of two things should happen: Either the player will have guessed correctly and the game ends, or the player guessed incorrectly and the game continues. Some form of loop is required for this, as without it, the player gets only one guess.

However, there’s one thing I forgot to mention in the last section that we need to consider: whether or not we want the player to have infinite guesses. My original version of this game had a 10-guess limit which I’ve carried to subsequent versions, but in writing this post I’ve realized that maybe a 5/13 chance of “winning” isn’t so great. If we are going to use a guess limit, though, it’s important to remember that numbers can go negative, so we need to make sure the game stops once the player hits 0 chances left.

In any case, most programming languages use something called a “while loop” to facilitate this, but in doing this project, I found out that the “while” keyword doesn’t exist in Go! Instead, Go uses the “for” keyword and you can simply put your condition in (i.e. our guess limit in the form of guesses > 0).

However, if we tried running this, once the player either wins or loses, the program doesn’t actually stop running! This leads to something that’s we need to stop our loop: the break keyword. This tells the program to get out of the loop after whatever is before it in its code block is executed. For our purposes, this is how we’re going to end the game when the player either wins (guesses the correct letter) or loses (runs out of guesses).

So we have our pieces, and through loops and if statements, have at least some of our logic down. However, I’d like to go a bit further.

**STEP 3: “Idiotproofing”**

This is something I feel like a lot of newer programmers would potentially overlook, but I think it’s important: some people are either going to not understand your game at all, or try REALLY HARD to break it because why not. Therefore, I like to try to “safeguard” the game by checking if something potentially gamebreaking happens and being ready for it. Here are a few of the ways a player could end up going outside the intentions of the game:

A. Putting in a number or symbol like 9, +, or even ñ. Personally, I’d rather not penalize the player for guessing the number 0 instead of the letter O.

B. Putting in a capital or lower case letter when expecting the other.

For those of you learning coding, upper case and lower case letters are considered completely different things in just about every programming language due to something known as The Unicode Standard (imagine an echoey voice saying that). This standard provides unique identifiers for characters in different languages (i.e. things like accents typically found in Spanish or French but not English), but also provides identifiers for other characters such as [the logo of that website whose owner wants you to forget used to be Twitter](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F).

Upper and lower case letters have their own Unicode identifiers, and since the game is actually checking those identifiers rather than the letters themselves, it sees “A’, and “a” as two different things, which would mean that should one be the answer and the other was the guess, would be considered incorrect.

To “get around” this, many languages have methods that change the case of letters in a string (i.e. a "to*Other*Case" method). 

C. Putting in more than one character.

We’re expecting only one letter as an answer, so we should account for if the player “fat fingers” an answer (like “we”), or worse, tries to somehow cheat by doing something like trying to guess “thequickbrownfoxjumpedoverthelazydog” since the answer’s gotta be in there somewhere, right?

For all of these cases, I put in a statement that tells the player that these are not going to work without penalizing them, and for the most part, this works!

Keyword “for the most part”.

Notably, Go does something interesting where multiple inputs separated by whitespaces are evaluated individually - if you put multiple single letters in separated by spaces, they will ALL be evaluated for whether or not they’re correct. This poses an interesting quandary for our game - and one I’m still trying to figure out how to “solve”.

Finally, there’s one other thing I’m still trying to figure out: protecting against guessing a letter that’s already been guessed - I have this in other versions but am still trying to get it to work in Go. If you know how to do this (or see something important that I missed in this version), let me know!

Anyway, that's been quite a bit, but I hope it gives some insight on how learning how to code works.

(Also, yes I know I'm publishing this on Halloween)

Go Go...Something Something


Hi.

If you somehow managed to get here, that neans that you saw the link to a project I did called "Giftstar" on my portfolio site. You're probably also wondering what the heck you're doing here on a blog instead of any type of web app.

Here's the thing: It's offline...for now.

Giftstar was, in essence, my bootcamp "capstone" project. It was a full stack project that I largely did by myself with a small bit of outside help (one person who worked on authentication and another who did absolutely nothing of value). Yes, I'm aware that a full stack app produced by bootcampers isn't super great, but it was meant to be a start towards something that, in my mind, would have real life uses.

As part of the bootcamp, we were told about Heroku, and its features (plus my lack of knowledge of other alternatives) made it seem like the perfect place to deploy the project. In 2022, however, Heroku decided to do away with their free tier and asked everyone to upgrade to a paid tier. This was controversial at the time for many reasons; among them was the fact that Heroku was one of the few hosting options that could support both a frontend website and backend server together. I felt that there was no real need to pay for Heroku; however, when I went to try and bring the project back in hopes of updating it, I found that EVERYTHING HAD BEEN WIPED. Personally, I had been meaning to do a rework of the application anyway, so I'm not too heartbroken over it (besides, the code is still up).

So that answers the question of what happened to Giftstar the project. However, that still doesn't answer the question of "Why are you here?"

Well...my hope was that the website you came from would not have to be relevant - or at least, by the time it was, my rework of the project would be ready to release. Sadly, in case you couldn't tell, that didn't happen. 

Long story short: App is currently down and I'm working on bringing it back as a new version. However, since my portfolio site may receive traffic now, this is my stopgap measure so that I don't link to a generic Heroku 404 error.

Giftstar


*AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was written as a test for content and formatting blog posts. As such, it's super random and not very...useful (for lack of a better term), but I'll leave it here so you can see a bit of "behind the scenes" stuff.*

This has been in the works for WAY too long.

Have

You

Ever
Heard
**lorem**

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. 
It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying. 

The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be 


```
unnatural. 
```


He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.

Testing 1, 2, 3


*AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was written as a test for content and formatting blog posts. As such, it's super random and not very...useful (for lack of a better term), but I'll leave it here so you can see a bit of "behind the scenes" stuff.*

MORE POSTING

IS AWESOME

Overclocked Overthoughts

Go Go...Something Something

Forward

September's First

Oh hai bloggy

Hello World...Again!