Personal Projects! 5 days of solo development. I’m excited.
I’m developing a VoteCounter, and spent the weekend studying up on my Javascript as well as Rails Best Practices.
I’m hoping to have all of my Models & Associations done by tomorrow.
We had some nice detailed instruction on creating a rotating carousel for our shopping cart through JavaScript and some CSS trickery. I’m not the first person to think that I’m really enjoying jquery.animate().
I’m sure you’re not the last person to groan reading that.
Back to Rails & Javascript with a shopping cart application! I’m starting to understand what the node/express/meteor peeps are talking about when they talk about the cost of context switching. I haven’t had enough experience, so I’m mixing casing conventions, semicolons, etc, when I move between Ruby & Javascript. Experience will fix that.
I’m programming solo today, so it’s moving along much more slowly than usual - but I get to type 2x as much as usual, and the patterns are making their way into my head. What’s great about solo development is that you can’t have a partner as a crutch, so you *have* to learn.
They provided us again with more detailed instruction for implementing Asteroids. I probably made it about 3/5s of the way through the exercise, but my implementation side experience with javascript is far, far better.
More work on the gist project. Every now and then, it’s great to work with someone who outmatches you, as you learn better patterns, workflows, insights etc.
The downside is that you slow down the team a bit. Sigh.
Afternoon was spent learning about HTML Canvas and using it with JavaScript, so we’re doing asteroids!
In other JS news, keyword this is mangy dog that doesn’t know who it belongs to. Ah, just google ‘keyword this javascript’, and you’ll notice how much of a problem it poses. It’s really just a few days of practice to get used to it, but ugh, killing me!
Ah, ajax & jQuery. Worked on a clone of gist, implementing a ridiculously light Rails back end to supply data for an interactive-ish javascript front end. Ryan Bates implements Ajax utilizing more of the Rails infrastructure, while we are posting to json, and implementing all of the javascript in-page. It’s a little bit like going from simple-form to form_tag (except starker). We get a better understanding of what’s going on underneath the hood, and long term learning, but man, the other way’s so much easier! :-).
Compared to shorter projects, we’ve been provided with more instruction, so the breakdown is much more manageable.
The wonders of being the first to upgrade means I got to file my first bug! Long story short, the OpenSSL cert needed to be renamed cert.pem in the OpenSSL directory. The solution was patched same day, so how’s that for service?
The next big issue is that debugger and pry-debugger are broken… I’m left with console.log until this is fixed!
After whittling my way down the Mailbox waiting list (from 230k), I finally got my copy. Mailbox supports my Gmail and Google Apps (i5labs) email addresses, so I’m in business. I started the day at over 4,000 emails in my combined inboxes, but combined with Sparrow (for OS X) I brought that down to 198. Once I get some invoicing out of the way, I can bring that down to 50, and I’ll be at IB0 within a week.
I have a few other mail tools that I use to keep myself sane. 1. Sanebox. I can’t live without it, as it keeps my phone from buzzing with spams, notices, etc. 2. Contactually, I started using 2 weeks ago, and it’s been amazing. If you want to keep in touch with people - friends, acquaintances, leads, etc, I can’t stop recommending Contactually. It’s incredible. I’m looking forward to configuring all 3 more deeply.
In the meantime, Mailbox has replaced Sparrow, and I’ll write some follow up notes in the coming weeks.
Michael Galpert has some notes on combining the Sanebox and Mailbox experience with a “shared” folder that he calls Daily Reads.
Ajax! We got a lecture on how to implement it, but I didn’t get quite far enough into my project to save photo coordinates and their tags into a Rails App. I’ll try to get that done this weekend.
More Snake. It’s got a more than a few items to think about - growing the snake when the apple is eaten, collisions, walls, etc. A lot of what we learned in the first few weeks of building minesweeper, chess, etc can be re-applied. Rendering to the web utilizing jquery is a pretty fun exercise.
Also began an exercise to re-implement Facebook’s Photo Tagging feature - just the JS side. Pretty freaking amazing that 6 weeks of training has allowed us to build this much.
