My girlfriend, Michelle, is spending this summer learning to code with the intention of creating a startup. She finished her last exam of the year on Thursday (analytical chemistry) and has already started pursuing programming.
Prior to this weekend, Michelle had dabbled in PHP and HTML/CSS here and there, and had a one-semester class in Matlab for her Chemistry program. So when she said she wanted to learn Javascript this weekend, I thought that writing an old-school helicopter game using Canvas in HTML5 and getting it live by the end of the weekend would be a reasonable goal.
Always looking to impress – and quite frankly, from my perspective learning Javascript is easier, or at least way more fun, than writing three chemistry exams in four days – here it is: HTML5 Helicopter.
This is definitely my new favorite game. My high score is 87 131 202.
For this one, I had to take on the dreaded product manager role; it was incredibly frustrating not being allowed to write or talk about code, and having to instead provide high-level constructive feedback and wait while Google answered questions to which I knew the answer.
That’s all part of the learning process, though, and I myself learned a valuable lessons: not being able to do real work invokes an overwhelming feeling of helplessness and uselessness all at once, and is not something I would wish upon my greatest enemy. But the old adage that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself is nowhere near as accurate as I had previously believed.
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