March 27, 2013

About 21 months ago, before I even knew what a callback was, I built my first webpage. In honor of its 21 nested callbacks, I think it's about time I finally take a second look at it.

At the time I had a perhaps cliche habit of doodling in my notebook during humanities classes and family road trips. One particular summer road trip yielded a collection of triangles that I thought looked pretty cool. I decided that a worthy mid-summer endeavour would be to reproduce it digitally. I also thought that would make me extremely cool on Tumblr.

I began by asking CS major friends if they could point me in the right direction. The canned responses I received can be summarized as"Google it." Subtext: "If you can't figure it out from there, you're incompetent."

"I'm trying to make a triangle on my webpage...but Google doesn't seem to give me any good results."

"No, Google 'CSS triangle.' See? It's simple."

"Sorry...what does CSS have to do with triangles?"

The chat logs usually come to an abrupt end at this point, or "CSS is simply how you style your HTML."

(I gathered from these exchanges that programmers have a perpetual competition to see who can claim the most things as 'simple.')

I left each conversation feeling extraordinarily incompetent. Nevertheless I discovered how to make a triangle shape with a div (what's that stand for?) and a few lines of CSS and found a few sites that had cool color-changing effects that I could replicate for my triangle art.

I'm sure you're curious now what I could've possibly conjured up.

Well, here's a glimpse of the HTML:

<divid="row1"><divclass="btri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="emp"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div></div><divid="row2"><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div><divclass="tri"></div>
 ...

I am sad to report that this goes on for another 165 lines and that the accompanying JavaScript is just as geometric--spoiler: it's a parallelogram.

I learned that there was this thing (library?) called jQuery and that I could use this 'API' thing called 'animate' to change my triangles' various properties gradually. I found that if I called $('#something').animate({ 'opacity': '0' }) once, it would make one triangle disappear. In my head it felt logical that if I wanted my 20 rows of triangles to disappear one by one, I had to write that same line 20 times.

I also 'imported' jQuery by copying and pasting the contents of the library to the top of my JavaScript file. I had seen it in a separate file on others' webpages, but I decided to keep all my JavaScript in one file for no particularly good reason.

If I wanted to lie to myself, I could say that I chose the most optimal way to code: in the hard fashion.

$(".disappear").click(function(){$("#row20").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row19").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row18").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row17").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row16").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row15").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row14").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row13").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row12").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row11").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row10").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row9").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row8").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row7").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row6").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row5").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row4").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row3").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row2").animate({"opacity":"0"},100,function(){$("#row1").animate({"opacity":"0"},100)})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})

You can see the full sourcehere and the final producthere.

(I even went through the trouble of indenting each callback properly, a nontrivial feat in Windows Notepad.)

Note that the Javascript ends with a flourish:)})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})})}). At the time I was just glad that my triangles were disappearing and reappearing as intended. The code itself was like a magnificient ASCII waterfall or those Incan irrigation systems I often saw in AP Spanish. It worked, and nothing I read on Google told me that things were actually terribly wrong and that any programmer who read my code would never let me nor my progeny near the web again.

By the first time a real software engineer took a look at my triangles code, I had already read enough of SICP to realize that my code was something ghastly and terrible. "But any beginner would make the same mistake, right?" I probed, embarrassed.

"No, no programmer would do something this." He was not sarcastic. I wanted to switch back into Molecular and Cellular Biology right then. But then he added, "No one would end up with code like this because they simply would not have had the patience."

Whether or not he meant the second part, I felt a bit better about the whole thing.

Regardless, at the time I buried my triangles in shame. As the days and months passed, however, they have gradually become more of a silly icebreaker. "Hey, you just spent 2 hours debugging a whitespace issue in your CoffeeScript? Take a look at the time I spent a day writing 21 nested callbacks and 200 identical lines of HTML." It usually generates some self-deprecating amusement.

I've realized that with each piece of code I've written since my triangles, I've only gotten better at "Googling it," debugging, and being generally competent about miscellaneous programming topics--and it's all because I saw each and every silly project through.

I took the time last week to do a quick rewrite of my triangles. You can find ithere, boasting responsiveness and all that dynamic generation stuff I wasn't into back in the day (of course, I had to trade out the obvious optimality of my previous implementation). I kept true to the original spirit of using divs for my triangles and jQuery for animations.

Now that I am leaving the safe, tree-hugging walls of Berkeley for the real world (and hopefully laying my past crimes against code to rest), I hope to leave behind between one and three corners of the Triangles Legacy for budding tinkerers and self-conscious makers.

Programming is hard. Don't ever feel bad because you aren't as good at 'just googling it' as the person next to you. Don't ever let hackathon snobs talk you out of creating the next Twitter for cats or Yelp for public washrooms. Even the dumbest ideas (like trying to make animated polygons disappear and reappear) will help you improve as a programmer. Learning to program is largely about learning to learn--and the best way to learn is to do.

At the end of the day, being a competent programmar isn't about how many hackathons you win or how many novel ideas you can come up with--it's about execution, attention to detail, and relentless dedication and passion for building and breaking.

And if you ever feel self-conscious about your code, I'll allow a laugh at my expense at Triangles' 21 nested callbacks.

Some links