Christmas Letter 2017

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to everyone! 2017 was a big year for Aarica and I (and Emmett too, of course). We worked hard to develop our relationship, our education, and our careers, made some big steps in each of these areas, and built on some of the goals we set out for ourselves in 2016.

Or rather, Aarica and I did those things–Emmett played with hair ties, chased mice (computer mice, that is, not real mice), and meowed a lot.

I did not write a Christmas letter at the end of last year, but I did write a blog post about some of the biggest things that happened to our new family. Last year, Aarica and I celebrated our one year anniversary since we met; Aarica received her Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, was promoted to the position of Site Director at ABC Child Development Center, and picked up a job at Butters Daytime Eatery; and I started studying Ruby and JavaScript software development at an online coding bootcamp called Bloc, was promoted to full-time as a Retail Sales Associate at T-Mobile, and picked up work as an intern at the Colorado State Senate and as a driver for Lyft.

Most importantly, though, Aarica's parents gave me permission to ask Aarica to marry me, and she said yes on New Year's Eve!

So this year, we built on these things. Over the summer, Aarica began working on her Master's Degree in Elementary Education at UNC and finished her practicum observing other teachers in Greeley's school district. This means that she will be student teaching at High Plains School in Loveland next semester, have her Master’s Degree this summer, and start teaching next fall! She has continued to work at ABC throughout the year and worked part time at Portrait Innovations and American Eagle on weekends.

I am in the final weeks of my Bloc Software Developer Bootcamp. When I submit my open-source project, I will officially be done with the course at the end of this year! I continued to work at T-Mobile throughout 2017, where my title was changed to “Mobile Expert,” and did some Lyft driving on the side. Fortunately, all the coding at Bloc has paid off–just a couple of weeks ago, I was hired as a part time Software Developer at Radial Development Group in Loveland, a consultancy that works with small businesses to build and maintain websites and apps. Radial is a great, supportive team and I have loved working there so far!

Aarica and I have really enjoyed this first year of our engagement, and now two and a half years of our relationship. We moved in together in an apartment in Loveland earlier this year, and wisely chose one with a spare bedroom that has since become my sister Meghan’s room. It really feels like home now, even to Emmett, who was terrified when we moved him here.

Over the summer, Aarica got the opportunity to go to Japan to visit her parents and brother, who are living there for her dad’s work promotion, and came back very tired from jet lag but with a new appreciation for ramen that we are still trying to satisfy. Right around that time, I hiked Grey Rock, puzzled out an escape room, ate ice cream, and played Mario Kart with Nathan, Ryan, Trevor, and Mr. Liston for Nathan’s bachelor party. We took two separate wedding road trips this summer–one to Iowa for Nathan and Kat Liston’s wedding (I was best man!), and one to Jacob and Meagan Walker’s wedding. We hope everyone won’t be all wedding-ed out by the time ours rolls around!

Speaking of which, we picked our wedding venue: Wedgewood Tapestry House in Laporte, Colorado! We can't wait for that day–so much so that Aarica seems strangely excited when we simplify things and refer to ourselves as "Dan and Aarica Rice" on something mundane like the internet bill.

Those are all the big things, I think, but there are also lots of little things. Aarica and I stuck to our tradition of seeing the latest Pixar movies each summer and fall, which means we managed to stomach Cars 3 and tried not to cry like babies at the end of the masterpiece that is Coco. We also decided to start adding Pixar ornaments to our new Christmas tree every year, beginning with the movie we saw on our first date, Inside Out.

Gael García Bernal, Gabriella Flores, Libertad García Fonzi - Remember Me (Lullaby) Disney*Pixar's Coco now playing in 3D!

Just to make sure that no one doubted our nerdiness, we kept up with all the latest Avengers and Star Wars movies, played lots of Mario together, binge-watched several Netflix shows, and explored Zelda: Breath of the Wild for untold hours.

We watched all of the Northern Colorado fireworks from Horsetooth for a second year in a row together, got a beautiful Fracture print of a picture taken of us at Nathan and Kat’s wedding, and I did my duty as a fiancé to keep Aarica happy–which mainly means keeping her warm via blanket or fireplace and getting her lots of pancakes, chicken wings, and ice cream. I have so far avoided burning down the apartment each time I have made pumpkin pancakes, which, I’ve just realized, is one of the bigger accomplishments in this letter after all. I’ve gotten to be spoiled by Aarica’s fantastic mustard pork and beef stroganoff recipes all year, so fortunately my attempts at pumpkin pancake production remain few and far between.

And I get Aarica flowers every month at the anniversary of the day we met, because boy am I lucky to have her.

We learned a lot. We worked hard. And we had a lot of fun. We love all of our family and friends and wish everyone a happy and safe holiday!

Dan and Aarica (Rice)

Post number 27.

From Sales Associate to Software Developer

Bloc was kind enough to do an interview with me recently about why I chose to learn how to code and why I chose them in particular (versus a traditional college degree or a different bootcamp). The interview can be found here. I already said what I needed to say there about my choice to study software development at Bloc, but I thought I would go into a little extra detail here about why this was, and is, a struggle for me. My responses to the interview were accurate, but I think I sounded more like I have life figured out in the interview than I really do.

Easily the most stressful element of choosing this path is financial. I don't want to make a career choice based solely on how much money I make, but one of the reasons I wanted to get into software development was that I knew it would teach me a more specialized skill, and more specialized skills generally result in higher pay, which is useful when you have a ton of student loan debt (like me). It probably doesn't help that our capitalist society has a strange, contradictory habit of looking down on people who want to make more money. Wanting more income is not greedy, in my opinion, at least not when you're trying to get out of debt and move up to a reasonable wage in the United States (which appears to be right around the $75,000/year mark, since that's when studies say there's no longer a correlation between income and happiness). Sure, there are hedge fund managers who make so much money that they could not spend it all if they tried, so giving those guys a raise does nothing to improve their quality of life and is therefore a waste of money. But most folks just want it to be easier to pay the bills without having to pinch every penny they get, and it's therefore nothing to be ashamed of to want a raise.

The second-most stressful element of going into software is that even over a year into it, I still feel extremely new to it. This is obvious in some ways–of course I'm new, it's a field that many people study for decades and still have lots to learn! But I honestly can't say that I had tried to learn a new skill in the eight intervening years between when I started learning to code at 24 and when I started learning to play guitar at 16. I was accustomed to being pretty satisfied with my writing ability, even though that too could doubtlessly use some improvement. It makes me second-guess my decision, though. Should I go back to a field I'm more comfortable in? Or should I stick to this one?

The last stressful element of it is that I overthink everything. And by everything, I mean everything. I overthink writing this blog post, I overthink code, I overthink talking to people. I don't really know how to fix that, but it's been a constant issue with trying to plan my future out (which really never works as planned anyway).

As I've been writing this article, I got a tentative, I think, offer to work at Radial Development Group, and that cheers me up immensely. But I guess planning for the future often stresses me out as much as it can excite me.

Post number 26.

BlocWorks

I have been hard at work completing the third of the four units in Bloc’s Software Engineering Track. This one, Software Engineering Principles, felt as though Bloc was taking the training wheels off. Generally, the first two units (Back End and Front End Development) had the implicit expectation that I get my code to work, but that it did not necessarily need to be pretty. As long as the Rspec tests passed or, in some instances, the web app I had built did nothing more than not crash, my work was approved.

In this section, the bar was much higher. From a purely technical perspective, the coursework was far more challenging, as it required me to build a Ruby object-relational map and a back end web framework using Rack. But on top of that, my mentor’s expectations in terms of the quality of my work were much higher. It was not enough to just make it work; my code also had to be more flexible and reusable, more efficiently structured.

It was an immense challenge for me, a year into my journey to learn to code. But now, BlocRecord and BlocWorks–the ORM and Ruby framework I built–are complete and approved. A developer could pull them off GitHub and build a back-end web application using them, in fact, complete with model-view-controller architecture, database management, and a search engine operation I built in myself. Be sure to check them out.

And now, on to the final section of the course: the open-source apprenticeship.

Post number 25.

Let's Get Technical

In previous posts, I’ve attempted to make convoluted coding problems understandable to most people. This is because in general, I want my blog to be mostly-readable to most English-reading people, which means I tried to speak generally about learning new skills and changing career paths. But at the end of the day, I am studying software engineering, and not everyone has a background in that, so to talk about it, I'll have to get into the weeds a little bit once in a while. This is one of those times.

Bloc’s Software Engineering Track starts you off slow. It assumes that you have no coding experience other than some of the prep work the course has you do before you really start working through their curriculum, so you start with the fundamental concepts of coding. The first unit of the course, Ruby on Rails Back End development, was therefore focused on the basics. What’s a variable? What are strings, integers, booleans, loops, arrays, and hashes? How does model-view-controller (MVC) test-driven development work? What in the world is Rspec? What is Ruby, and what is Rails?

What I looked like pretty much every day when I started my coursework at Bloc (I have fewer laptop stickers, though).

The Front End section focused on front end web development. Since all modern web browsers support JavaScript code out of the box, this meant I was learning JavaScript and some of the frameworks and libraries associated with it. There are dozens of these, like the super-popular jQuery library and AngularJS framework that I used to build Bloc Jams. There are more recent and obscure frameworks, like Meteor, which I have so far used to build the foundations of my personal project, Moneytracker. And there are many technologies that I have not yet been exposed to, like React or Express.

Because it’s so ubiquitous, JavaScript has a gigantic community. In fact, it’s the most popular language on GitHub (more than double the popularity of Java, the runner-up, which is closely followed by Python and Ruby, according to GitHub's 2016 statistics). So it was great learning about such an essential language in the programming world for this section.

The tricky thing for me was readjusting from JavaScript back to Ruby for the third unit, Software Engineering Principles, because Bloc’s course uses Ruby and some inspiration from Rails to teach me about algorithms and complexity, object-relation maps (ORM’s), and framework architecture.

The foundations of BlocWorks.

I am now nearing the end of the third unit. It does not have any big personal projects at the end for me to show off like the first two units, but it is significantly harder coding, and in the end I wind up with a functional (if somewhat basic) Ruby framework and ORM that could theoretically replace Rails and ActiveRecord. I noticed today, while struggling through a framework architecture assignment question (“Support instance variables in your framework that can be called in a controller method and accessed by its respective view”) that in order to even solve that problem, I had to know how to do a bunch of little things that would have stumped me all on their own a year ago.

To develop BlocWorks (the Rails-like Ruby framework I am working on), Bloc has me not only building the framework, but also integrating the ORM I built earlier, BlocRecord, and building a web app that utilizes the two, BlocBooks (which will allow users to make their own personal “libraries” full of books they can track, a bit like a simpler version of Goodreads). So to attack this assignment question, I had to:

1. build some Ruby controllers and Embedded Ruby views (files ending in .html.erb, which are basically HTML files that can compile Ruby code rather than JavaScript) for BlocBooks, passing some instance variables to them (like `@book`),

2. make sure the controllers rendered the views in question by inheriting a `render` method from BlocWorks’ `Controller` class, which I tested using (Rack-test), and

3. finally get to the part where I solve the problem, which I did by looping through all of the instance variables available to the controller method, and using the Ruby `instance_variable_get(instance_variable)` method to pull the values of each variable. In other words, once everything was set up properly, my solution was a modified `render` method for the BlocWorks controller:

def render(view, locals = {})
      klass = self.class.to_s
      klass.slice!("Controller")
      controller_dir = BlocWorks.snake_case(klass)

      filename = File.join("app", "views", controller_dir, "#.html.erb")
      template = File.read(filename)

      self.instance_variables.each do |iv|
        locals[iv] = instance_variable_get(iv)
      end

      eruby = Erubis::Eruby.new(template)
      eruby.result(locals)
end

To someone who has been coding in Ruby for years, all of that may sound somewhat unremarkable for them to accomplish. Customizing a framework (or not even using a framework) is not all that out of the ordinary, even if building a framework from scratch might be.

But for me, partway through solving this assignment problem I was reminded, quite vividly, that I had come so, so far since starting with Bloc. A year ago today, I could not have even told you what a view or a controller was, let alone written a functioning one. And that was just a very small part of the problems I’m solving now.

I don’t say this with the intention of bragging–far from it. I still struggle with new coding concepts on a pretty regular basis at Bloc. But I am now at a point where I feel confident that I can find the answer if I don’t know it offhand, and I can say with some confidence that I can code in Ruby. Not bad for one year of bootcamping!

There is still a lot for me to learn, to be sure; there are plenty of coding concepts I don’t quite grasp, and an endless ocean of languages, frameworks, and libraries I have never used. No coder can do all of it, of course, but I am excited to be at a point now where I can write about code (without feeling out of place), develop full-fledged web applications, and start getting more involved in the development community.

Now I just need to take it full-time!

Post number 24.

Is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild the Perfect Zelda Game?

I'm going to take a short break from blogging about coding and writing today. Instead, I want to talk a bit about video games, both for people who like them and for people who don't (and eventually get to the topic of the latest Zelda game).

I first played a video game when I was about seven years old. Some of the other neighborhood kids I knew had Game Boy Colors (this was the late 1990's), which introduced me to the existence of these devices that could play pretty complex games on little cartridges you could buy from your local retail store. As it turned out, my dad already owned a Game Boy (the original, big gray brick variety), which he had used to kill time, apparently, while serving in the Gulf War. He had Super Mario Land, Wheel of Fortune, Tetris, and Double Dragon for me to try out when I caught sight of it tucked away in his desk drawer, so for the steep price of $0, I got in on this new world of video games.

Back in my day, young whippersnappers, the gaming screens were black and green!

Since Game Boy was the first gaming device I could ever call my own, and I liked it a lot, I was naturally inclined toward Nintendo games (this is often how I make decisions: if I get a company's product and like it, I keep buying from that company in future; if I get a product and don't like it, I don't buy from that company again. Hasn't led me wrong yet). One thing led to another, and I became a fan of game series like Pokemon, Mario, Metroid, Super Smash Bros., and my very favorite, The Legend of Zelda.

I've owned some PlayStations, mainly to play Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Infamous, Uncharted, and Metal Gear Solid. I've played some Xbox games with friends. But to this day, I always feel like I have more fun with Nintendo games, the very best of which, in my opinion, seem to have the most polished and immersive gameplay in the world. They're often light on story, but in video games, a simple, mostly-visual story is often the most effective kind.

The Super Mario Galaxy games told a compelling story in very few words.

I sometimes convince myself that I'm going to outgrow video games, probably because old people like to tell young people that video games are for children and I sometimes take that advice (almost) to heart. It's resulted in me making some stupid decisions, like selling my game consoles that I end up wanting back later.

But here's the deal: I don't think video games, as a mode of entertainment, are "for" any one particular age or "just for kids" any more than Disney movies are "just for kids" or literary books are "just for old people." Yes, childish people yelling at their Call of Duty game gives video gaming as a whole a bad name. But then again, one could argue that reading trashy romance novels gives reading a bad name, or watching Transformers gives watching film a bad name. And yes, there are many examples of people who are too addicted to video games for their own good. But again, this phenomenon is not exclusive to video games; Netflix binge-watchers (and the very fact that you know what that is) are a prime example of how people can get addicted to all sorts of entertainment forms.

This is a stereotype, but like all stereotypes, they have to come from somewhere.

The difference is that video games are still a very new medium (home consoles have only existed for 30-40 years or so, and if that doesn't sound young, think about what films were like 30-40 years into their existence). This presents two problems: one on the part of the consumer and their misconceptions, and one on the part of the industry and how it presents itself. The issue underneath the two is that both problems must change to make video games appeal to everyone.

Because video games are new media, old people don't understand it, don't care to try to understand it, and therefore don't like it, the inverse of young people. Social media, rock music, rap music, home television, and movie theaters have all followed similar trajectories. New media often pushes boundaries because artists like pushing boundaries, but whether it's goofy Snapchat filters, Grand Theft Auto telling a story that's some hybrid of Breaking Bad, The Godfather, and Scarface through a video game you control, AC/DC singing about sex, or Elvis hip-thrusting on TV, the problem is not that the new media will "corrupt our youth"; the problem is that people think it's corrupting the youth.

On the flip side, the video game industry (particularly when it comes to home console makers as opposed to mobile/handheld devices) has had the most success selling to males in their teens and twenties, so it continues to present itself as a form of entertainment designed for that niche. There are probably a dozen first-person-shooters or more released every year, most of which are sequels because those are safer to make, the same way that every movie gets a sequel now whether it's good or not, like Man of Steel. And as long as the industry thinks that that's the most important market to sell to, the perception will persist.

The good news is that there have been huge strides forward in this area recently. Nintendo is often a pioneer in this area, for example; games like Animal Crossing, Nintendogs, and Wii Sports do anything but cater to the stereotypical young male gamer. Even their two most popular shooting-based game series buck the violently-kill-everyone-you-see trends found in Call of Duty, Halo, Killzone, Resistance, and Gears of War, one by being bright and colorful and family-friendly (Splatoon), the other by focusing on single-player exploration, building a compelling atmosphere, and fighting hordes of monsters rather than other people (Metroid Prime).

Metroid Prime is all about exploration and atmosphere, not about how many kills you can rack up online. Better yet, you can get all three games in the Metroid Prime Trilogy, with revamped Wii motion controls, for $20 (not per game, total) on the Wii U eShop.

The other big shift in the industry, of course, is mobile gaming on phones and tablets. "Hardcore" gamers, as they call themselves, are often condescending about this area of the market, because it offers an "inferior" (re: different) experience from the gaming experience found on a home console. But between pick-up-and-play titles like Angry Birds, Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run, Words With Friends, and Jetpack Joyride, story-focused games like Old Man's Journey and Broken Age, and more intensive games like Clash of Clans, Infinity Blade, The World Ends With You, and Fire Emblem, it's clear that while mobile games must be controlled differently than console games to be effective, they are by no means a niche.

So what does all this have to do with my love of The Legend of Zelda and the latest title in the series, Breath of the Wild?

Breath of the Wild is f***ing awesome, that's what.

My theory is that more people would enjoy and appreciate video games for their puzzle-solving, the skill required to master many of them, and, believe it or not, the cost per hour of entertainment they offer (relative to going to the movies or paying for cable) if they were 1. eased into the complexity of how the controls work in modern games, and 2. experienced more games that were not designed solely for young men. Nintendo attempted this with Wii Sports, and was hugely successful, at least when it came to actually selling the console (they sold over 100 million units, making the Wii Nintendo's bestselling home console ever). The problem is that they failed to bridge the gap between Wii Sports players and the more experienced gamers who got a Wii for Zelda and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, meaning many people who bought the Wii didn't actually buy any games for it since Wii Sports came in the box.

Of course, Wii Sports is roughly as simple to play as your average mobile game. You tell the game you're actually throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club with a button or two, but otherwise the controls are based entirely on gestures. Mobile games, similarly, rely exclusively on swipes, taps, and presses to be controlled.

So how do you transition from there to the more complex games? In the case of Nintendo games, I think the solution lies in the past, and the mobile games I mentioned before.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, to a longtime fan, a hardcore gamer, or both, is an absolute masterpiece of a game in every sense. Don't let the people complaining that they don't own a Wii U or a Nintendo Switch distract you (because game consoles are generally a better value after a few years of building up their library, I have the Wii U version and don't yet own a Switch). Don't let people who haven't played the game deter you by pointing out that every weapon in the game except the Master Sword breaks quickly (you get so many, and can stockpile so many, that I never ran out of things to hit people with between the beginning and end of the game simply by exploring, and while I did sometimes wish the game was more forgiving about repairing broken weapons, it made the gameplay challenging in a fair, interesting way). It combines many disparate elements from past games (the sprinting, jumping, and platforming is from Skyward Sword; the ability to use enemy weapons is from Wind Waker; the truly open-world, go-wherever-you-please approach, and the old man giving you guidance, is from the original Zelda, and more recently A Link Between Worlds; and the horse-riding is most similar to Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess). It also improves on each of these things. It takes some inspiration from other big adventure games, like The Elder Scrolls and Fable, but maintains (and even improves upon) the simple love of exploration Zelda games of the past have often engendered, which can sometimes get drowned in dialogue-heavy narrative. It has a great video game story, which is to say it's more compelling because it says little. Honestly, if I were to recommend any one video game, of any kind, to anyone, it would be this game. Playing it absolutely blew me away, and while I'm a huge nerd playing through the whole darn Zelda series right now (I'm working on The Minish Cap, which so far has been a lot more fun to replay than Skyward Sword), I'm certain I'll love playing through it a second time.

None of that matters, however, if you look at Breath of the Wild and see a game that's way too complicated for you to understand. What you need to recognize is that video games got to where they are now–controlling your character with one control stick, controlling the camera with another, controlling camera lock-ons and weapons that shoot people with trigger buttons, and controlling jumping, talking to other characters, and weapons that slice people with the buttons on the face of the controller–through a ton of trial and error over several decades of development. The jump to 3D environments made games significantly more complicated.

Therefore, my proposition to people who are interested in getting into more complex games but feel a bit overwhelmed by them is to play them after playing an older or more traditional game in the series. Breath of the Wild is a hardcore game, both in how it controls and how difficult it is. A better starting place, therefore, is one of these three titles: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The Minish Cap, or A Link Between Worlds (A Link to the Past, a great classic game but probably the hardest of the three, is an $8 download for the Wii U or 3DS; Minish Cap is $8 for Wii U, and probably the best if you own a Wii U but not a 3DS; and A Link Between Worlds, which is maybe the best option because it's the newest, is $40 on 3DS).

I mention these because they're all two-dimensional games, meaning the camera is always fixed overhead rather than being manipulated by the player, taking half the difficulty away right off the bat. Additionally, they all have reasonably steady learning curves, teaching the player how to play while they play. Lastly, they are all super fun!

From there, I would probably advise trying Ocarina of Time in its 3DS remake incarnation, or Wind Waker or Twilight Princess in their Wii U incarnations, because all three are easier games (they get tough toward the end, but have very gentle learning curves). From there, you'd probably be ready to play Breath of the Wild–and appreciate it more because you've seen a bit of what came before it.

Why am I even writing this? I suppose because I had an amazing experience with Breath of the Wild, the sort of experience people love to tell other people about (like when you saw The Dark Knight or the last season of Breaking Bad). But I recognize that to appreciate the game the same way I do, it is probably advisable to get a feel for Zelda as a series and get your feet wet in video games. Many people who will enjoy, or already have enjoyed, Breath of the Wild already have this experience, of course. But that feeling of sheer, unlimited, open adventure and exploration and fun that this game brings... I would encourage anyone interested to give it a try.