By some miracle, Katey still laughs at my jokes (some of them anyway).

This photo was taken a few hours ago but so much of its sentiment is if it was taken after we started dating fifteen years ago as Freshmen at Hunter College.

These words and the sharing of this photo are meant to spread an iota of the joy that we bring each other and that we value our friends and family in bringing to us in making all that we do, are, and will be possible.

With much love,

The jumping one.

There’s dipping your toe in the water, there’s drinking a glass of water, and there’s swimming in the ocean.

Today, Codecademy decided it was time to drink a glass of coding water. Until now, it was just a dip of the figurative toe. So, this happened to me before where I thought I knew something and it turned out that that was seriously called into question later…

I had obtained some degree of proficiency as an actor by the time I had begun to study it for my master’s degree. After all, it was in 7th grade that I began to think of auditioning for LaGuardia High School. It’s what you did if you studied Drama with Ann Ratray. You did the school play, yes, but you also took up a monologue or five… And you worked on this for months until it was time to audition for the “Fame” high school in 8th grade.

Harvard admits about 5% of applicants. LaGuardia’s Drama department, last I heard, took about 1 in 60 when I applied. That’s around~1.6%.

This might be the first time in a young actor’s life that he or she should learn a lesson they’ll have to learn repeatedly: the odds are not as important as the fit.

Some things are just not a matter of numbers, they’re a matter of quality, they’re a matter of whether or not the peg fits the hole. I fit what the selection committee decided it needed. I’m convinced I was lucky. There were definitely some more talented actors than I was who auditioned — I’m certain of that. However, what there likely wasn’t were actors auditioning of my type who were necessarily appearing as more talented than me on the day that I auditioned for the archetype that the teachers might have been trying to fill for their ensemble. In summary, it doesn’t matter how many people audition for a role or a spot on a team. If they aren’t the right fit for it, they don’t get onto or into it. If they are, they might. You cannot control certain factors with regards to fit. All you can do is all that you can.

I had worked hard. I was admitted to LaGuardia. I worked hard there. I was admitted on a full merit scholarship to the CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. I worked hard and was admitted on a full merit scholarship to a top-ten actor-training conservatory, the Asolo Rep/Florida State University.

What I found was that I thought that I was a seasoned long-distance swimmer. In some respects, yes, I had certain skills that had brought me a good deal of success that I had worked hard to hone. I had dipped my toe into the craft of acting when I was performing monologues. I had drunk many glasses of water throughout my scene studies, throughout the various productions I had performed in college, in student films, and off-off-Broadway. I had even done some laps, maybe I had even swum a few miles offshore in Oxford University when I did 6 plays in a schedule similar to a repertory theater as well as a summer at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The thing is, and this is what I had found with the Rock Paper Scissors x99 exercise with Codecademy, you can only prepare so much for activities that contain fundamental differences between them although they’re related. Yes, a monologue is related to the discipline of being an actor. Yes, scene study is too. However, there is an altogether different fortitude to doing theater work in repertory not just for a year but for years. I had the privilege of diving into deep waters and to working and living and breathing and loving theater year after year for my three years with the Asolo. That quantum leap between acting a monologue and living in a theater was akin to coding exercises and actually calling up terminal, accessing a file, and knowing how to begin a project. Sometimes with these things, there just aren’t instructions in this life.

I confess I was short on time. I had to watch the solution video to even just get started. I had thought that I’d know enough to be prepared but I just had to progress. I’m glad I tried to look through the documentation of Mocha and Chai to make sense of what I was being asked. However, I think I made the right choice and I don’t feel that I sabotaged my learning by “flipping to the back of the book.”

I now have a much better understanding of test-driven development and arrow functions. Looking back, I don’t think there was a reasonable way for a student in the position I was in to know that the first step was to npm install . I think that’s a little like an actor walking into a rehearsal room for a play and saying “I didn’t know I was supposed to work from the script.” But that’s where I’m at! I had done the npm install as part of project 0 but I thought that was because of the nature of project 0, not because of test-driven dev… ah, learning!

Day — 6: Project 1: Rock. Paper. Scissors. was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scope refers to where a variable can be accessed in a program. While some variables can be accessed from anywhere within a program, other variables may only be available in a specific context. Scope depends entirely on where a variable is declared.

You can think of scope like the view of the night sky from your window. Everyone who lives on the planet Earth is in the global scope of the stars. The stars are accessible globally. Meanwhile, if you live in a city, you may see the city skyline or the river. The skyline and river are only accessible locally in your city, but you can still see the stars that are available globally.

We’ll learn more about scope in this lesson through the use of variables.

I mean, come on! That’s beautiful…

We spend our days accessing certain bits of code nestled inside functions... There’s the getInTheCar block of code for most commuting Americans, and there’s the getTheGroceries program too. These seem important. Indeed, they may be important. These seem like they might be global in their scope to us at the time we’re executing them but I write this a day after my sister decided, on a whim, to not go to the Trader Joe’s that ended up getting rammed into by a man’s car while he fled the police. Thank goodness she just happened to decide not to traipse over across the street with her daughter, which would have put them squarely in what became a three-hour standoff with a gunman who ended up killing the manager of the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s.

It’s awful.

It puts things in perspective. I encourage my fellow Americans to install a script in themselves that runs daily until the epidemic of gun violence is addressed:

Text the word RESIST to Resistbot on Telegram, Messenger, Twitter or to 50409 on SMS* and it’ll find out who represents you in Congress, and deliver your message to them in under 2 minutes. No downloads or apps required.

Day 5 — Scope was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

— Hamlet (3.2.4–5)

Being able to fathom alternate ways of doing things frustrates instructors and students alike. Case in point:

This works where topping may either be a parameter defined as an argument of takeOrder in line 5:

const takeOrder = (topping) => {
  console.log('Order: pizza topped with ' + topping);
};

takeOrder('mushrooms');

OR it may be a variable that has its data interpolated into the string that the console is printing as follows:

//mushroom as variable
let topping = 'mushrooms'
const takeOrder = () => {
  console.log(`Order: pizza topped with ${topping} `);
};

takeOrder();

Both of these print Order: pizza topped with mushrooms

Both have the same tasty result.

However, for the purposes of learning, one is asked not simply to produce but to produce a certain way.

I cannot tell you how painful it was as a student actor to use my being, my voice, my body before my classmates and our instructors, to move an audience in accordance with a director’s wishes and yet be told that I had done what I did wrong. And they were right. I had not produced the intended result in accordance with what we had been taught. I had, as I have done so often throughout my life, done my own thing. I hadn’t relied on the technique we had been taught and upon which we were being graded.

Mastery of a skill requires knowledge and commitment to a craft. Nothing gets in the way of learning the hum-drum ins-and-outs of a craft as inspiration. The craft is meant to kickstart inspiration. It is meant to be there when inspiration is not. The craft is what you can rely on when the muses do not sing to you.

It’s painful but it’s worth learning on those days when you’re at sea in a sailboat when there’s no divine wind blowing.

Day 4 — Functions was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s happening here?

1. You’re seeing Git Bash (for Windows) run a JavaScript file I’ve coded that works as a Magic Eight Ball.
2. The JavaScript file is below:

//Magic Eight Ball
let userName = 'Ron';
userName !=='' ? console.log(`Hello ${userName}!`) : console.log('Hello!');
const userQuestion = 'Will I become a werewolf tonight?';
console.log(`${userName} asked ${userQuestion}`);
const randomNumber = Math.floor(Math.random() * 8);
let eightBall = '';
switch (randomNumber) {
  case 0:
  eightBall = 'it is certain';
   break;
  case 1:
  eightBall = 'It is decidedly so';
  break;
  case 2:
  eightBall = 'Reply hazy try again';
  break;
  case 3:
  eightBall = 'Cannot predict now';
  break;
  case 4:
  eightBall = 'Do not count on it';
  break;
  case 5:
  eightBall = 'My sources say no';
  break;
  case 6:
  eightBall = 'Outlook not so good';
  break;
  case 7:
  eightBall = 'It is decidedly so';
  break;
  case 8:
  eightBall = 'Signs point to yes';
  break;
  default:
  eightBall = 'Reply hazy try again.';
   break;
}
console.log(eightBall);

3. Here’s what going on:

i. The user, (in this case,Ron), gets a friendly “Hello, Ron!” or if the username is blank, it’s just “Hello!”

ii. You’ve got the question getting printed to the screen “Ron asked will I become a werewolf tonight?”

iii. Then you’ve got the logic that assigns an answer based on the program picking a number randomly.

Some thoughts

Now, look, I know that this is no masterpiece… I realize that there are mistakes in the above but the fact is it’s basically working and served its purpose as practice for the concept of control flow (e.g. given a condition, execute one block of code or another).

How does control flow relate to acting? It’s about choices. What is it that makes it seem like the code above is alive somehow? Why is it that characters on a page or a stage seem somehow endowed with an immortal spark? It’s the capacity to imagine alternative outcomes that holds a kind of magic worth studying.

Day 3 — Continued was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The instructions were to print to consolegoal not Goal…

Now, sometimes the urge to have things done a certain way that makes sense to me is not what’s being requested. In acting, we talked about the importance of recognizing our “defaults.” It’s like a poker player and his/her “tell.”

It takes energy to reprogram one’s self. It takes a level of attention that may not be customary to day-to-day existence because otherwise one might not have the ability to get anything else done. It’s like riding a bike and learning how to do so at the same time. There’s a need to synthesize an understanding rather than just analyze into parts. It’s tough to hold the two together if not impossible. So, we sequence them. First we analyze, then we practice what we’ve learned.

When I am looking at the instructions for an exercise, I try to keep my hands off of the keyboard or mouse. Why?

I want to create (insofar as I can) a separation between listening for instructions, drinking them in, and executing. It’s actually tough. I just want to go, go, go. That’s how mistakes happen though. It’s like a musician not knowing how to honor a rest or an actor not knowing how to breathe.

Day 3 was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wrote:

Console.log(IsInteger

Instead of:

Console.log(isInteger

That took me like 5 minutes to figure out yesterday as to what was going wrong.

The other mistake was writing:

Console.log(Math.ciel

Instead of:

Console.log(Math.ceil

I… before E… except after C. Apparently whilst coding, I’ve forgotten elementary school grammar…

So, why am I telling the world this?

A) I can’t be the only person who made these kinds of mistakes. I’m hoping that someone out there is going to take comfort in knowing they’re not alone in their making these kinds of blunders. I’m hoping that they’ll see I persisted despite my not being the fastest learner and that it gives them some measure of hope.

B) As an actor, I learned a great deal about interpreting text and about creativity. Nowadays at least anyone who does Western theater is expected to be able to know their lines. There’s talk about being “letter perfect” when memorizing. 99% of theater fails at that. The director, the stage manager, the other actors, the playwright… they always tolerate *some* deviation from this platonic ideal.

I found living up to even the non-platonic-ideal to be excruciatingly difficult. I found that I had a highly active imagination prone to sabotaging me. It would convince my tongue that I had spoken words that my scene partners were waiting for me to say when in fact I had not spoken them aloud. It’s like being a cab driver who’s SURE he or she’s gotten you to your destination while you’re still on the way there. I would (without meaning to) re-order words within a line. Sometimes, even with the playwright in the room, I would substitute his or her words for my own, again, without meaning to… *it was murderously difficult for me to get to “letter perfect.”*

However, I did sometimes. And my education as an actor taught me that I was at my most creative, that the audience was at its height of enjoying my work when I did the absolutely soul-crushing, gut-wrenching slog of word-by-word, and sometimes even, letter-by-letter pursuit of perfection and once in a great while I would actually get it. Those performances were qualitatively different. There was a marked difference in being passably or even very close to perfect and actually being letter perfect. There is an emergent property from being letter perfect. It is extraordinary how much freer one is when that peak is summited.

All that is to say that I developed a certain level of pride in my ability to pay attention to words and here I am screwing them up all over again. It is humbling to again be a novitiate and excellent reminder that the work never really ends when it comes to training one’s self to be mindful, orderly, and as excellent as one can in that pursuit in which they’re engaged.

There is a level of tenderness and a quantum of self-forgiveness one requires to make the work bearable. Self-laceration has to be mitigated. That itself is a skill that requires practice I’m sure to get…

Day 2 was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyhow, I thought it might be interesting to keep a Medium blog running about what I learn.

First, you might be interested in:

1. why I’m focusing on JavaScript.
2. why I selected Codecademy

Why I’m focusing on JavaScript

The guys over at freeCodeCamp have an awesome podcast and I particularly liked Quincy Larson’s “Which programming language should you learn first? ʇdıɹɔsɐʌɐɾ :ɹǝʍsuɐ”.

That article is written specifically with job seekers in mind (and I’m happy at Advisen Ltd.), so, I’m not studying JavaScript to find a new job. The points that Quincy makes still apply though to me or anyone who’s thinking of learning to code:

JavaScript runs on any device that has a browser, right there in the browser. You can build basically anything with JavaScript, and share it anywhere.

That’s incredibly powerful from the perspective of someone who’s been dabbling in code on-and-off for years. Code, to me, is most exciting when it is being used and it is useful, when it is saving my coworkers time by automating what they used to have to do manually, when it is scoring leads we might otherwise not prioritize, and when it is creating personal connections at scale by connecting site visitors with the data they freely gave us about themselves so we can provide great service.

As the administrator for both Salesforce and HubSpot, I care deeply about integrations running reliably. That means getting smarter about the APIs that are making calls between the apps upon which our business intelligence is built. Salesforce will always have Apex/Java running somewhere in its DNA but with the shift to Lightning, they’ve very much moved to JavaScript as their language du jour. JavaScript also extends the functionality of HubSpot from a dev point-of-view. So, for me, as I look ahead to how I can advance the work of Advisen, I’m thinking that this is the way to go. Further, at a certain point, you just have to start somewhere. Every legit programmer I’ve spoken with basically comes down on the side of “learn one language well and go from there”.

Why I selected Codecademy

Once I figured that I wanted to focus on JavaScript, I focused my search away from:

• Salesforce’s own class offerings ($3.5k+) and Java (Apex) based with only a few hours of online instruction (some in-person offerings but not in a great location for me and, again, not quite cost-effective or the right focus especially since their free learning solution, Trailhead, is so awesome);
• The great community over at General Assembly (Rubyists / ~$13.5k);
• The other great community being cultivated in NYC over at Flatiron (Rubyists / $15,000);
• Jeffrey Way’s Laracasts are *brilliant* and you should subscribe to https://laracasts.com/ — that said, I wanted some more hands-on guidance in real-time than was being offered. Also, I am not the fastest study and yet, Jeffrey’s teaching was effective enough to get me to insult my friends within minutes of enrolling in his Vue.js course:

• Hack Reactor/Fullstack/Bloc — I really didn’t want to pay that much and my time is extremely limited. I needed a study schedule that allowed for a more flexible time commitment.
• So, what about Thinkful? Well, I read some pretty terrible reviews, and the cost was much higher than Codecademy.

So that’s how I selected Codecademy and JavaScript. Wish me luck. I plan on posting on my first impressions once I dig into the course content.

Let me know if you have any questions about beginning to code, education selection, living and working in NYC, or why a classically-trained actor is teaching himself JavaScript.

I can usually be found near the Advisen office at 39th and Broadway. If you’d like to grab coffee and chat, connect with me on LinkedIn and remind me to explain why there’s a horse emoji in my name when we meet.

Day 1 was originally published in An Actor Codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyhow, I thought it might be interesting to keep a Medium blog running about what I learn.

First, you might be interested in:

1. why I’m focusing on JavaScript.
2. why I selected Codecademy

Why I’m focusing on JavaScript

The guys over at freeCodeCamp have an awesome podcast and I particularly liked Quincy Larson’s “Which programming language should you learn first? ʇdıɹɔsɐʌɐɾ :ɹǝʍsuɐ”.

That article is written specifically with job seekers in mind (and I’m happy at Advisen Ltd.), so, I’m not studying JavaScript to find a new job. The points that Quincy makes still apply though to me or anyone who’s thinking of learning to code:

JavaScript runs on any device that has a browser, right there in the browser. You can build basically anything with JavaScript, and share it anywhere.

That’s incredibly powerful from the perspective of someone who’s been dabbling in code on-and-off for years. Code, to me, is most exciting when it is being used and it is useful, when it is saving my coworkers time by automating what they used to have to do manually, when it is scoring leads we might otherwise not prioritize, and when it is creating personal connections at scale by connecting site visitors with the data they freely gave us about themselves so we can provide great service.

As the administrator for both Salesforce and HubSpot, I care deeply about integrations running reliably. That means getting smarter about the APIs that are making calls between the apps upon which our business intelligence is built. Salesforce will always have Apex/Java running somewhere in its DNA but with the shift to Lightning, they’ve very much moved to JavaScript as their language du jour. JavaScript also extends the functionality of HubSpot from a dev point-of-view. So, for me, as I look ahead to how I can advance the work of Advisen, I’m thinking that this is the way to go. Further, at a certain point, you just have to start somewhere. Every legit programmer I’ve spoken with basically comes down on the side of “learn one language well and go from there”.

Why I selected Codecademy

Once I figured that I wanted to focus on JavaScript, I focused my search away from:

• Salesforce’s own class offerings ($3.5k+) and Java (Apex) based with only a few hours of online instruction (some in-person offerings but not in a great location for me and, again, not quite cost-effective or the right focus especially since their free learning solution, Trailhead, is so awesome);
• The great community over at General Assembly (Rubyists / ~$13.5k);
• The other great community being cultivated in NYC over at Flatiron (Rubyists / $15,000);
• Jeffrey Way’s Laracasts are *brilliant* and you should subscribe to https://laracasts.com/ — that said, I wanted some more hands-on guidance in real-time than was being offered. Also, I am not the fastest study and yet, Jeffrey’s teaching was effective enough to get me to insult my friends within minutes of enrolling in his Vue.js course:

• Hack Reactor/Fullstack/Bloc — I really didn’t want to pay that much and my time is extremely limited. I needed a study schedule that allowed for a more flexible time commitment.
• So, what about Thinkful? Well, I read some pretty terrible reviews, and the cost was much higher than Codecademy.

So that’s how I selected Codecademy and JavaScript. Wish me luck. I plan on posting on my first impressions once I dig into the course content.

Let me know if you have any questions about beginning to code, education selection, living and working in NYC, or why a classically-trained actor is teaching himself JavaScript.

I can usually be found near the Advisen office at 39th and Broadway. If you’d like to grab coffee and chat, connect with me on LinkedIn and remind me to explain why there’s a horse emoji in my name when we meet.

I blog about invention and entrepreneurs.

So much of what that has to do with is cultivating an understanding of how people have changed what came before them.

If we are what we eat, we can learn a lot about ourselves from the specialists who concot world-reknown dishes.

CNN has done a mitzvah by putting together this richly textured documentary on Jeremiah Tower who pioneered the meshing of disparate cuisines with fresh local ingredients that’s come to be known as California Cuisine for which Tower won multuple James Beard Foundation Awards.

After watching this documentary, I’m looking forward to learning more, probably from diving into Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet Magazine, Ruth Reichl’s, reflection on the Berkley kitchen Chez Panisse, where Tower made his mark.

Director Lydia Tenaglia has done an excellent job.

It is a pity that so many landmark endeavors become too popular and the credit eclipses the enterprise itself. Startup founders reading this take note.

Restaurant consultant Clark Wolf mentions in the documentary that Alice Waters had started Chez Panisse out of a dream of an “egalitarian bohemia.” And, as food critic Andrew Friedmen notes, where Alice Waters ends and Towers begins is a question that people will be asking for a long time to come. One is reminded of King Soloman’s baby. Some dishes aren’t so easily divided and it appears that the invention of California cuisine is one of those.