Need a new white board. This one's like 10 years old and only window markers work on it without leaving permanent blotches.
More importantly, I need to learn how to diagram projects better so I don't spend an hour looking from the board to my broken code trying to figure out what 'click button' was supposed to mean.
The electronic medical records program we use at our clinic is web based and my newest coding project is trying to integrate some of our inhouse programs more directly with the EMR.
At my still novice skill level this is only even approachable due to the framework Apple provides via WKWebKit which makes adding a web browser to a project almost drag and drop easy. Subsequently grabbing the HTML data presented in that browser turned out to be just one more line of code away. Yes, it did take me most of two days to realize grabbing the HTML was what I wanted to do, and then track down that needed line, but 'novice', remember?
Because the data structures and funtions I've been developing over the last couple years are going to be reusable in this project, I've already overcome the most obvious obstacle, but before I can use those extant objects, I have the leg work of redoing all the regular expressions I was using to parse plain text so as to dig the same data out of the HTML version.
In the long run I feel like working from the HTML is going to have some advantages, but it's going to take me a week to redo all these regexes including coding them to handle edge cases and it's a bit mind numbing.
I am getting better at using assertions and look aheads/behinds though, so I'm trying to look at it like weight lifting: focus on the gain rather than the unavoidable pain.
As complex as regular expressions can be to put together, because of all the wonderful tools and tutorials out there, I've always been able to work through that bit of stickiness with persistence and patience.
The biggest problem has been, and likely always will be, determining the patterns in the given blocks of text which will reliably match to the bits I want and exclude the bits I don't.
My favorite thing so far about learning to code is being able to hack together rough, highly specific utilities only I will ever use. It's usually to keep me from chuncking through huge blocks of data manually or having to hire another person to do it.
Even when it takes as long to write the code as it would to do the work manually (which is almost never at this point), it's so much more fun to write code, and the next time the same task comes up I'm ready to go.
Second to the fun of writing the code is not needing to worry at all about interface design.
