I’ve been in the dark for a while. I’m unable to decide on a course of action w.r.t. (With regards to) programming. Android is a mess right now since I don’t know enough Java, and the emulator for the devices is way to slow on my computer. So while I’m learning javascript through CodeAcademy, I’m also trying to figure out what else to work on.

I keep swinging between wanting to program in CL and make stuff thats cool and learn and practice concepts like databases, etc., and working on WordPress so that I have experience points that just might get me a job. Or a freelance project or two. Anything that might move me forward professionally.

Stuff thats cool

While learning new things, it would be great to work on projects that are already out there and are used. It would certainly be good to see the code by other people. It would be great to actually contribute to some of these projects. Thats the dream. So I searched for something that would interest me, and found cl-json. Its a library to allow CL to interact with JSON elements.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Wrong. I looked at the code for that and my brain stopped working. I could understand what each individual block of code could do, but I couldn’t figure out the ‘whole’. I couldn’t understand why any of the functions were being used, etc. It was embarassing.

Tutorial for Hunchentoot

I looked at Hunchentoot tutorials, and they seem to be a bit out of date. This one is great since its so simple and straightforward. I love this tutorial. Its amazing. Everything is explained around the code and the author even explained why things are done, which is what was frustrating me about the cl-json code. I’m going to start writing code that is like this tutorial from now on. Its amazing. Also, making code like this in your own project would help people get on board with contributing to it, which is always nice. Many hands make light work.

The problem with the code is that its out-of-date. Hunchentoot has changed some things, and I have made new code that does everything in that tutorial. The code for that is here. I haven’t explained the code as well as the original author, so just head on over to the original blog post to see how everything fits together.

Redo-ing this tutorial has been a lot of fun. It even introduced me to parenscript, which is great seeing as I’m learning javascript right now. I think I’ll go through as many tutorials as I can and update them too. Its great exercise, for sure.