The Monday After

AppAcademy got me addicted to learning technologies, and refining my new skills.  This weekend, completed the wonderful RegexOne, which introduced me to the fundamentals of Regex - a concept I’d never understood until this weekend.  I also covered CodeSchool’s RSpec, Rails Best Practice classes for review.

I’ve also decided that I need to learn at least one of the MVC Javascript front end frameworks.  I’m skipping Backbone, for now, as I’ve heard you eventually need/want the features of the larger frameworks, and I’m going to wait on Ember, until the documentation improves, and there are nicer step-by-step tutorials.  

Angular appears both accessible AND well documented, something everyone starting on a framework needs.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

Appacademy, Week 9, Day 1

We began final projects, and what a difference one week of practice makes!  Last week, it took 2 days to plan models & associations for a 7 table schema, and today, it took me 1 for a 10 table! I’ll take 2x improvement any day.  This week only gets about 4 days for our final projects, so I’ll take it.  My final project is WTFJS a mashup of JSFiddle & Stack Overflow.

This time around, I’m putting more time into planning tools, which is already paying off.  I drew ER-Diagrams using Sketch a fantastic vector drawing tool, and rails-erd served as a sanity check that I didn’t miss any pluralizations or other possible mistakes in the implementation of said diagrams.  I’m also creating stories using PivotalTracker.

It’s the last week of AppAcademy, and I’m starting to get a little emotional. I haven’t spent 8 hours a day learning with the same 16 people since… never.  Even elementary school was a group of 30 people.  And they’re all great, likable people.  

AppAcademy Week 8, Day 5

Demo Day!  For 5 days, there have been some impressive demos.  What I’m realizing is that a little JavaScript goes a looong way.  Yesterday, VoteCounter just took members, and counted votes.

Today, it’s got a user auth through Devise, permissions, but more importantly, it draws a frigging chart in your face as each vote is successfully registered in the application.  That’s the feature that got all of the oohs and aahs.  

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 4

I’m realizing that I’m spending a lot of time staring at code, trying to figure out a best practice way of doing it.  While I’m not quite there (I still have a couple lousy names that I need to change), I want to get these patterns to the level where it’s automatic, and when I go back to my code, it’s easy to understand.

AppAcademy Week 8, Day 1

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.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 5

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.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 3

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.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 4

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.  

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 2

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!

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 1

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.