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wooed over a burrito Wednesday, February 27 2019
Some part of Angular finally started making sense to me today, and it had to do with the way modules fit inside of modules when using pseudotags (or whatever those faux HTML tags are called that are expanded by Angular to form the web page content of a module). In the past, somehow I'd managed to use @Inputs and @Outputs to pass data between modules entirely within the Javascript. But the process seemed needlessly complicated and didn't seen to offer any advantages. Today, though, I found an example where the module is not only embedded using a pseudotag, but data to that module is passed as parameters to that pseudotag. This allows the module to pick up its data using just the @Input decorator. The "output" is handled entirely in the template using parameters within its scope. I was then able to easily use this system recursively (that is, I made a template having its own pseudotag within its HTML) to make a JSON-defined form within a form that actually worked reliably and with very little code. It's something I'd tried to implement in the generic form builder I used in the Mercy For Animals reporting system, though it was full of kludges and I'd never really gotten it to work in a proper recursive manner. Recursion is a beautiful thing; for a system of any complexity (and an infinitely-nesting form qualifies), when recursion works, it feels like magic.
I was hired by my present employer to work on building out a fairly new set of applications that have framework-based Javascript frontends and C-Sharp backends. The person who got me this job is Alex, the guy who hired me for years to work on things like keywording apps and even a system to place a hexagonal grid on a Google Map. He runs the half of the company that deals with legacy software mostly written in Delphi (an object-oriented form of Pascal). I've been indefinitely borrowed by Alex's team to migrate a complicated app from impenetrable Python to something more accessible (and transportable), and that's what I've been working on for the past three months. Today Alex took me out to lunch (I picked Cancun, the festive Mexican restaurant in downtown Red Hook, hoping perhaps there would be beers, though we both ended up drinkin water) and then said this was to "woo" me into joining his team. It might mean I would have to learn to code in Delphi, which is not the sort of thing one wants to be putting on ones resume. I told him I wasn't opposed to joining his team. I like working with Alex, and the folks on his team seem a little livelier (and funnier) than the dead fish on my team. Ultimately, though, I'm mostly in this line of work because I enjoy problem solving, and I would probably want to take work from both halves of the company depending how effective I could be.
I should mention how my food was at Cancun. Alex ordered had the pork burrito and at first I didn't know what to get, since the main menu doesn't seem very vegetarian-friendly. But on the back, as almost an afterthought, there are some vegetarian options. So I ordered the "green" vegetarian burrito with no cheese or sour cream, and it ended up being very good, particularly with the habañero sauce they fetched me when I said I wanted "very hot" hot sauce. It wasn't a West-Coast-style burrito that can be held and eaten like a sandwich; it didn't come in tin foil and had to be eaten with a knife and fork. But that's what I'll be getting if I ever join my co-workers for one of their legendary two-hour margarita lunches.
One sad bit of news unrelated to work was that Alex's dog Augie had died at around the time Gretchen and I had left for Costa Rica. He'd gotten loose, as he sometimes did, and then been hit by the Amtrak train as it sped at high speed through Tivoli. This wasn't even the first time Alex had had a dog that was killed by a speeding train. So now he figures his household has lost its dog privileges permanently, unless they get an overweight dachshund or something.
The experience of being "wooed" made me feel a lot better about my work. I've been working at this present joyless project for, as I said, three months, with very little to show for it and thus very little encouragement from my employer. They have faith in me, perhaps more than I have in myself. Indeed, I'm often haunted by self-doubt, and despite plenty of supporting evidence for the theory that I am able to carry things through to completion, I always tend to fear a complete collapse in my abilities until I've delivered what I'm building.
On the way home, I stopped for provisions at the Red Hook Hannaford, buying broccoli, lettuce, spring salad mix, bananas, orange juice, bloody mary mix, mushrooms, cans of white and green beans, vegan "milk," beer, and a smallish bag of ice-melting salt (for helping extricate the Subaru from a block of ice). I'd had such a good day at work that I celebrated by drinking a road beer on the rest of the drive. There was a cop parked on the side of the road just east of the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge. Where the hell was he yesterday when that swerving car was such low-hanging fruit?
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