Susanna Codes

I take your hands and you can take my mind "I take your hands and you can take my mind,  Separately created but I know we can do better" - Bayonne, "I Know" I love the live loop version of this so much. And in general, this is one of my favourite songs. I can just listen to it over and over again and again. I love the concept of thinking we are separate but we are actually not. Because we are all really truly connected after all. That is the reality. Today's Blog Post Might have several different sections as it has been a busy busy day. So please bear with me as it might be a bit long. Section 1 = Routing Section one will focus on my learning from my apprenticeship front-end module this morning, which was on routing. Routing "How can we incorporate different routes into our application, while still ensuring we dynamically render content as an SPA?" [SPA = sing page application]. Routing is what determines the how an application responds to a specific U...

I'm Blue, Da-Ba-Dee, Da-Ba-Di Look here, it's 7 pm on a Monday. I've just spent a whole day reading more documents than I could ever explain in my life, pairing with 3 outstandingly wonderful senior colleagues, and looking at REAL CODE and I AM A REAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER DID YOU KNOW.  And so I am naming this blog post after a song I simply just find beautiful. You can find the best version of it here.   Oh wait no this one is even better.  Either way I find this song to be very inspirational. And inspiration is essential on this journey.  To work as hard as I do - you have to be inspired. And music is one place I draw this inspiration from. That, and renewable energy infrastructure.  I just love it so much... and also, oh, PYLONS. I like this wind farm. It looks so peaceful. Don't you think? A New Article I am reading a new article . I will read it very closely. In order to make the renewable energy transition we need to "[leverage] the technology that can t...

On the Nature of Daylight "I forgot how good it felt to be held by you". One of my favourite movies of all time is Arrival.  I can't believe the character of Louise Banks. She is so amazing and so focused and so passionate about what she does. She is such a role model. I love her quiet joy. I love her quiet gratitude and her quiet genius. I love her quiet focus. I love her true genius. Today's blog post is named after the song that is used in the intro of the movie. (And also interestingly, in Shutter Island). I want to be like Louise Banks, right? Focused. Quietly passionate about what she does. Knowledgeable. Dedicated. A lifetime dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. A true love of what she does. On Why Software Matters in Renewable Energy  No other industry evolves as fast as software.  The faster that tech evolves, the faster it has the capacity to evolve. Isn't that miraculous? And marvellous? It is inexhaustible. Like the energy of the offshore wind farms,...

The Internet Tower There is an internet tower near to my house in Luxembourg. Deep in the woods, where I am from, I use it to orient myself. But more importantly it points to my passion. It points to my desire. It points to my longing to be a software engineer. Which I am not done with yet. I am not there yet. I am not ready. I still have so much further to go. Reflecting on this week's learnings in renewable energy x software engineering I can't believe it's been less than a week since my first blog post on this topic. It's not a project though. It's my life. As Edward said to Bella: "You are my life now." LOL. What have I learned then this week? Last time I wrote a reflective post I wrote about what I had learned by reading through my old blog posts. But this time I want to go on my memory. What is the biggest theme I have found? Hardware vs. Software.  Hardware vs. Software Hardware in renewable energy is expensive to build. It requires new materials an...

Everloving Okay so let one thing be clear. I have a mission in life. A passion and a purpose. A power. A territory I want to get into. An energy. It is to be a software engineer in the renewable energy sector and that is my mission in life. It is my passion in life.  It is my power and my purpose. That is what I was born to do and am here on this earth to do. Will it change or not? I don't know. I think not. But it may expand. But there is a clear glitch.  Not a really glitch. A challenge. An obstacle. An opportunity. On Becoming a Better Software Engineer On one thing, let us be clear. Software engineering is my passion. I was born to do this. I am meant to do this. I have a natural aptitude for this. My brain is built for this. I was designed to code. I don't doubt this at all. But I have a colossal amount of things to learn. It's quite simply enormous. No amount of passion or talent can make up for the need to do hard work (unfortunately...). Nothing can change the fact ...

S.T.A.Y. How is it possible that I have never written a blog post before named after one of my favourite songs from Interstellar?  Why Software Will Save Renewable Energy Software is simply a cheaper solution than hardware. It is more cost-effective. It doesn't require new materials to upgrade an energy system.  The speed at which new software can have an effect also makes it a much better and more viable option for revolutionising the world of renewable energy. Also apparently hardware materials are getting more and more expensive (not to mention maintaining them??!) - whereas computing power is apparently getting cheaper. So software acts faster in systems. And it is cheaper to produce. Wow this is fascinating Apparently, the reason why software and not hardware can have a bigger impact on renewable energy systems today is not just due to the these two reasons. It is also that innovation in the grid can happen a lot faster at small, home-level, micro-level, micro-scale chang...

DERs - Distributed Energy Resources It's funny how times have changed. In the beginning, it is hardware that had the impact on energy systems. Nowadays, because software moves and evolves so fast, it is almost as though it is the only thing that is fast enough to keep up with the changing demands of energy. One thing that this article keeps talking about is Distributed Energy Resources - or DERs. What are these? I would like to understand. But unfortunately for the moment I am trying to answer 10000 software engineering questions as well at work. Ah, I see - these are "smaller generation units that are located on the customers side of the meter." Home energy generation stuff. Got it. And storage. ( Australian government source website ). So it is clear to me from the article that software engineering is playing a huge role in the technologies which are being built to manage this. This article talks about the "networks they create with the grid". But I don't ...

Never gonna make it What does it say about me that one of my favourite song lyrics of all time is "Wasted on my patio/ Never gonna make it"? (From "Words" by Bayonne). I know the feeling so well of feeling like I'm never going to amount to anything. I had a really really tough time in my teens and early 20s. Not least with dropping out of university but there was so much more going on as well. So I completely know the feeling of having messed everything up - even though now I realise that it was the furthest thing from the truth. What is an endpoint? This is a question I had for my team today: what is an endpoint? According to a blog on the web , an "API endpoint is a digital location where an API receives requests about a specific resource on its server. In APIs, an endpoint is typically a uniform resource locator (URL) that provides the location of a resource on the server". Just a quick note on APIs: "Upon receiving and validating the client...

Even when you're wrong I am super excited to be finally fulfilling my dream and my passion, to be finally fulfilling my real destiny: that of combining software engineering and renewable energy. It is my destiny to be a software engineer in the renewable energy industry. And so here I am: writing about both. Because that is what I want to do: to answer the question " How can software engineering help renewable energy?" I have gathered a collection of 10-15 resources and will be analysing them closely over the next couple of months.  Or maybe years.  If I spent the next ten years answering the question " How can software engineering help renewable energy?" then where could it take me I wonder? What about 10 more after that? And another 10? Or more importantly: how could my question deepen as I continue to ask it over the years?  And p.s. can it be done in a blog which takes 50% of its titles from Lana del Rey? Can it be done by a nerdy girl who brings teddy bear ...

I forgot how much I loved to code Note: I wrote this post on 4/9/23 and never shared it but loved it too much to delete it so I'm sharing it now Sometimes I feel like crying because I just forget how much I love to code. I sometimes have issues with my short-term memory for reasons I won't go into and it can make me forget what I love - or how much I love things. I know that that sounds crazy - but it is true. I love coding so much that it hurts. I love React and JSX so much that it hurts. I love the logic and the sense and the patterns and the balance that it restores for me in the universe when I code. Just doing this React right here right now has been so amazing for me. JSX Keys Lists in JSX sometimes need to include something called keys.  KEYS DON'T DO ANYTHING VISIBLE! And their values have to be unique. "React uses them internally to keep track of lists.  If you don't use keys when you're supposed to, React might accidentally scramble your list items in...

Like the summer breeze One thing that fascinates me about Lana del Rey is her love for the seasons.  "When you know, you know Then it's time to leave Like the summer breeze" So many of my favourite songs by her reference the seasons. Far too many to list. Although of course "Yosemite" does too. But today's quote is from "Paris, Texas" again, the song that I referenced yesterday. I love this song.  I am still obsessed with the softness and gentleness of it. Like everything Lana del Rey produces it is so soft and so, so gentle. This picture reminded me of a summer breeze... UX Testing "Writing unit tests for every component ensures that our components work exactly like a user would expect them to work. By utilising unit tests, we can build with confidence and be alerted as soon as some portion of our code breaks out application". Hmmmyes I see. That sounds hard - and like quite a lot of work, actually. But it makes sense...  Some other poin...

Paris, Texas This is a beautiful song by Lana del Rey although I am going to talk about this later on. I really feel like I need a lot of this kind of softness and gentleness and beauty. I am struggling a lot to adapt to everything. It is really hard to be back in the workplace. It is so weird to be back after bootcamp and to come back to work. Luckily, we are working on a plan.  We are working on a plan for how to structure my time. We are working on a plan for how to use my time to balance my apprenticeship learning with my "at work" work, HOWEVER: I got a really important pointer today and that's that it's ALL my work. It's ALL the SAME WORK. I mustn't view it as separate. I mustn't view it as "sometimes I am doing apprenticeship work and sometimes I am doing work work." No.  It is all the same job and it is all the same work. It is really helpful to see it this way. And so having said that we are working on a plan for how I manage my time and...

'Cause I'm good in spirit, warm-bodied Oh my goodness. Today's blog post profiles one of the most beautiful songs in existence - "Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he's deep-sea fishing" - hey man - don't know it 'til you've tried it. Yes the title is weird. Yes it's long. IT'S ALSO ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SONGS THAT YOU HAVE EVER HEARD OR WILL EVER HEAR IN YOUR LIFE. I CANNOT stop listening to it today. How beautiful it is. How much softness and gentleness. Today's blog post is about state management Why bother with state management? State management is very important to software engineering.  "Component-specific memory is called state". I am not 100% sure what this means. However this helps: "state is data that changes." So therefore: "when the state object changes, the component re-renders". What this basically means is that: When new data is available, the individual compone...

At the whims of my heart and my soul What's better than Lana del Rey? Not much. But Lana del Rey singing with her father on his piano album is pretty amazing and Rob Grant is a wonderful piano player. My gosh he just plays it so beautifully.  Lana's two collabs with her father, "Hollywood Bowl" and "Lost at Sea", the former of which this blog post titles cites, are two of the softest and gentlest Lana songs that I have ever heard. And nobody does softness and gentleness like Lana does. And that is one of the things that I love about her. Because she can stop me. And get me to pause. And slow me down. And there are times when nobody else can do this. And I love her softness, and her gentleness - so dearly. I have been focussing on CSS frameworks today, so let me talk about those. I am catching up on Week 2 of my Front-End module, which I missed because I was ill. Whoop whoop exciting times! Why would you use CSS frameworks? A CSS framework is a bit like a Jav...

Be the ocean, where I unravel Today's post spotlights "I Follow Rivers" by Lykke Li. Although I am personally obsessed with the Marika Hackman cover. That's what I have on repeat today - and that's what this post references. Good UI (user interface)  This is what I have been learning about today, and I would like to write about it. Understanding User Needs As a common theme, this is at the forefront of good UI. This is across so many things, including accessibility which is such a key part of user design. How can you make a product accessible if you don't know what accessibility features a user needs?  This relates really well to general UI stuff where you need to keep researching, asking your consumers what they need, and you need to keep testing as well. This relates to one of the coolest things I have learned today which is about Feedback. Interactivity On the subject of feedback and interactivity, it's important to keep on giving users feedback about w...