5 Million Seconds of Code

Project Ramblings 

I suppose I'm content with fixing auth, but I'm still at a lost on how a model extracts data when creating content an adding to itself. The jQuery code examples require more examination so I can add the public_id to a new table upon a success upload. In backbone I could do it with asynchronously but with Rails not so much...

Today I'm focusing on making an upload page. I think the end of the day will have me focusing on making an edit page to apply filter. Hopefully at that point I can slap on every other filter too. 

Let's rejoice though. 5000000 seconds ago I entered a world I romanticized about. it's surreal to be in this environment and program, because everything I imagined has been strangely spot on - amazing people, a crazy city, an industry of creation. Everybody here are making cool things, from scratch. To see everybody develop from scratch is nuts to me. We're all from such different backgrounds, but now we're here at a place like this.

Project Ramblings

The functionality is there. I can sign up, sign in, sign out, I can upload images, and I can get images from the server.

It's just that. 

They don't work together at all. I have to string them up and create functionality that makes them play with with each other, but right now I'm just content that I image uploading working. 

I'm not sticking too well to the agile development philosophy, because development has been frustratingly slow. I'm in awe of my fellow peer's progress, but in reality I haven't been keeping up the pace at all. 

I decided to go with Cloudinary as a server because their URL's have built in image transformations. This whole day was getting comfortable with Cloudinary's api and jQuery plugins. Unfortunately there isn't much documentation on Backbone+Cloudinary so I'm left to scrounge things myself....it's exciting, but I can't help but wonder if I chose another path I wouldn't face such problems.

But I chose Cloudinary because of it's functionality. Cloudinary gives me a server, image transformations, and image filtering all at once.  After that, I can focus on making spinning shit. 

Project Ramblings

I feel like I'm drowning in work. In reality, I have 3 or 4 major features to focus but everything thus far has been hand fed to me. Now I have to build something from the ground up, testing and making sure the code doesn't break catastrophically. Things WILL break - but I must be vigilant and careful to avoid the debugging trap.

Today I was focusing on getting authentication going. My original plan was to get Images going, but I'm still mulling over on the best way to approach that. However authentication is a safe bet and I wanted to start with something I know more comfortably.

However, before I tried auth, I explored setting up with Heroku. I worked with Heroku before because of Micheal Hartl's tutorial, but that was many seconds ago. I got lost in following instructions and tried adding my git address instead of the heroku address as a branch...there were errors I never googled before.

My main goal ultimately was to get user sign up and signing in going, with a successful sign in being redirected to a painfully droll hello world greeting page. I was able to get that going at the last second in a very thrilling marathon against time.

Tomorrow I plan to build the Images in rails and backbone, and hopefully get a thumbnail index show and a images show page going. The images will have a description and an owner...many things to think about. Oh, likes and maybe tags. But first getting images. And exploring filepicker.io. 

Class Ramblings

The wheels are off. I'm now tasked to make a shallow simulacrum of Instagram and I'm intimidated at the project at hand. I have to make the back end, the front end, and the styling - full stack development. I will do it agilely, with a huge focus on features and vertical slices of my plan. 

I'm disappointed I didn't get to touch JQuery UI, investing most of my time in Composite Views and nested associations. The time invested was mostly on tracking bugs and syntax errors while working with the built in composite view class. I'm now unusually comfortable with Composite views, but I wish I got the fancy things in. 

Class Ramblings

Time has flown. Before we embark on a final project voyage, we are tasked to recreate a full fledge Trello clone. Trello is a productivity app styled after boards and looks to be really useful for organizing many people together toward select goals. I sure could use one for my final project, most certainly.

I'm trying to recreate it from the bottom of my Full-Stack heart.  I needed some helped getting started admittingly, but I found myself going off the rails as soon as I started getting my views working. I like to think I'm oddly comfortable with Composite views, but fitting them into the application is another beast entirely. Fortunately i have another day to think about all the trello code i want...

Class Ramblings

Almost there. Yet not nearly. I think we had the last of our pair programing projects, and today we did the journal app. This is the third backbone app, and fortunately I actually recognize things. I understand now the relationship between backbone and rails, how backbone fetches things from rails, how the world to the left of # is different to the right on the right. Things are making sense. 

I wish I had one more week to make a couple more apps before our demo day project. I need to put more time in, but I'm still maxed out at 604800 seconds a week.

Class Ramblings

Another day, another app, another trip through Backbone. I believe we are operating near fullstack - we have Rails for the back end, and Backbone for the front end. Which sounds unintuitive now that I wrote that out. 

After yesterday's project of making a pokedex, today was app was making a journal app. At this point I recognize many of these features are essentially the same thing - create a text object, call it Todo, Post, or Comment, then link it somewhere. Creating functionality is the game here - can I show it?  Can I show a lot of it? Can I make it, can I edit it, can I destroy? Linking all these up is a huge feat which  i hope becomes easier over practice. 

We worked on making things from the ground up and making routes and views. I actually really enjoy making these projects, it's just that I'm not as fast as I'd like - the problems I encounter aren't too mystifying. I feel all the pieces are there, and I have to piece them together. Time is the resource I unfortunately don't have much of...

Class Ramblings

We were all about working with views and routers today. We built up JST templates with underscore's template function. Instead of building html with jQuery and appending everything repeatedly. 

WE lost about an hour of time because of a stray parenthesis missing from our tags in the template. It's very difficult to spot errors in the template, since we can't exactly call debugger by the time we need it. We can do a binary search method...ie commenting sections of the html until we find what we want. It's probably best to limit our usage of embedding javascript code as much as possible, it's too scary of a world in HTML...

Class Ramblings

Today was unusually fun. I had lousy sleep last night, and I was about to ready to tap out of doing Backbone. But I knew I had to soldier on and start laying down some code before I go down a really dumb path. Fortunately today's project had a Pokemon vibe to it which I'm all about - somewhere, in another life, I was a really serious competitive Pokemon player who probably scored 4th or 5th place finishes at various local tournaments.  i think I'm writing API and code for client-side activity. Instead of having the server do all of the work, I'm using backbone to have the client handle work too for that sweet, sweet, single page application. With backbone, i"m reconstructing models and views with a java twist. 

Tomorrow we continue our journey by fleshing out our pokedex app. I'm very happy about that. At least I can think about pokemon all day and think about winning 1st place some day in my alternative life. 

Class Ramblings

OH man! I'm not terrible at JQuery! Perhaps the instructions were unreasonably clear. Perhaps me and Weihao read the material better we ever have. But this wasn't a steep climb, but rather a hilly hike with a lot of things to see. 

I think it's because our plugins had immediately cool effects that hooked us into these projects. We made slideshows with slick sliding effects and we made a thumbnail previewer - features that people would actually use. 

Can't digress too much. Unfortunately there's an assessment tomorrow and that begs way more attention. 

Class Ramblings

For some reason I find myself in another new land with JQuery. I'm unsure what I'm doing with it, but it allows us to perform cool things on with its selectors. I think we covered CSS to build up more experiences with HTML tags, because now we're able to target those tags and perform more logic with it. 

Our projects today were a handful games - doing Tic Tac Toe and Towers of Hanoi for the 3rd time, with a JQuery flavor. I'm more excited to play with CSS however, ever since I discovered transformations and transitions. WIth those features, I can play with static elements and make them more livelier. 

Class Ramblings

  This day had a different change of pace. In the midst of closures and callbacks and immediately invoked functions, there was a scenic route into the world of CSS. Where HTML forms the skeleton and Javascript powers the brain, CSS is what grafts a skin to make everything look pretty and approachable.

  I was a bit reserved about diving into CSS because I barely remember my experience from CSS Diner and the CSS exercises at Code Academy. Fortunately, my partner and I had a great time towards the end exploring CSS and ultimately, webkit shenanigans. We were tasked to create a CSS stylesheet for posts and a website. The first few hours were a bit droll, but we were proud to have something that looks like a website.

  Then we discovered webkit. With webkit, we can make elements in the page animate - we had scaling, transformations, and weird kinds of of stuff interacting with the mouse cursor. At first we just wanted to make a dropdown menu, but one simple question sent us down the rabbit hole of making things fly around.  

Class Ramblings

  I came prepared; I really wanted to know Asteroids today. I was exciting to meet up and have a chat, and I didn’t want to disappoint - first impressions are important. I’m very happy that my partner, an Erik, was just as excited to meet Asteroids too. We both had reservations on how well we were going to do - we were both content to simply make a circle on a canvas. Fortunately, we got much farther than we thought we were capable of and suffered minor bumps along the way.

  Today covered prototypical inheritance and the module pattern. We were creating some beefy code without much recourse to test it consistently along the way...but we followed directions and examples, and only had a handful of bugs to squash. After we had a toe stub on loading our scripts in the right order, but we were soon on our merry way afterwards.

Class Ramblings

  Friday I had the pleasure of working with my new favorite person, Travis. He’s a mad genius; you poke him with a stick, a box of uncoiled knowledged is waiting to spring out. It was a good temperament in contrast with the slew of Javascript exercises we have to do. At this point, working with javascript is still a nightmare for me but I’m slowly getting a grasp of asynchronous behavior and javascript’s syntax.

  Tomorrow we work on the foundation for an asteroids game. It relies on inheritance, which seems like we have to build ourselves. From what I can recall form the reading, inheritance relies on creating a Surrogate function to serve as the middle man for a parent prototype to its child. Why we do this unclear, but i think it’s because we don’t want to mess with calling the parent’s constructor type. It’s very confusing, but a few more iterations will help shed some light on it.

  What’s more exciting is working with Blank Canvas, and generating figures for the browser. I’m already encountering CSS jargon, what’s more language to learn gonna do? There’s not enough time to finish all my projects...I just want to code these projects to satisfaction, but I must finish App Academy to satisfaction first.

Class Ramblings

  Oh man, am I ever so happy to have someone like Isis for a Javascript buddy. She’s about the javaScript life. On point, and more than happy to explain things to me. After the plushy world of Ruby, navigating javascript was incredibly arduous and full of gotchas.

  It seems we are reworking our old ruby problems into javascript. I am game - I love this weird parallel version where not a whole bunch of things make sense, yet is widely accepted everywhere. It’s as if unlocking a new game mode, where one replays the game under a harder difficulty.

  New Game+.

  Mario, the Lost Levels. Castlevania, inverted castle. Ghouls N Goblings, game 2. The syntax is more difficult and there are many conventions that I took for granted in Ruby - where’s my first and take? Why do I have to explicitly label my variables? What’s a closure? Why does it work?

  There’s a THAT with THIS? What does export do? Why are callbacks mythical creatures?

Only practice can tell.