Code till I crash

A little CSS here, a couple feature tweaks there. Not a whole lot of features, but, the main feature works. It doesn't look anything like Amazon though.

Today was basically refactoring some old code and adding some columns to my cart model so it didn't have to fire off too many AJAX requests. That caused some headaches, but, meh, it got resolved.

I think it's time to just heavily dedicate myself to making every page look presentable for about 2 days, and if there's still time, add some additional features like Facebook or Google+ login.

There is also a  Pokemon RESTful API.

Check it out

There's still so much to do... Definitely need to be a bit more productive over the course of the day.

Gotta add:

Notifications

Landing Page CSS

Multiple quantity purchases

Sometimes things are going great with the final project.

Sometimes... Meh. (Assets.... whyyyyy?!)

Missed a couple posts. Got a little too freaked out over the final project honestly.

It begins! Today we forged on our own paths and started to work on our own personal projects. It really is a "personal" project. Compared to a solo day where you have some leeway as to what you want to do, working on a personal project is definitely a treat.

First things first, I really did not remember User authentication so it was great getting to re-do it, as it's an important concept. Second.... WTF IS RAILS AGAIN?!

Honestly, half of it was muscle memory and simply reacting to seeing a pattern appear. The other half was just ".... I think... you can put this here.... that's fine right?"

Pretty straight forward day. Just wrap up what we learned on the Backbone end and try to wrap up everything we learned for the front end. Some of the newer concepts we got to play around with was the comparator method and using composite views.

I didn't quite get around to using composite views. I did get a chance to try out comparator, which is also apparently going to be on the next week's assessment. It can definitely come in handy for sorting items in our final project. I'm sure I'll be using it at some point.

Today we threw ourselves into Bootstrap. Supposedly it was supposed to help us stylize our pages much faster. Your experience may differ.

It gets a bit confusing when you have 4 "nav/navbar" in one class. I still don't quite understand where to throw certain classes. There were definitely times where visual bugs just ended up being accepted as features. Especially since we had free reign to design the pages.

The hardest part was definitely grid style. That will take some getting used to. Margins seemed to appear out of no where.

Anyway, the most interesting part of the day was probably using webkit animations to do some of the less "functional" features. Webkit animation seems incredibly robust and after exploring some of the most epic pure CSS creations, it's astounding what you can do with them. I spent a lot of time throwing in random easter eggs everywhere.

Backbone definitely has one of the most satisfying learning curves. It lets you do some pretty amazing things once you become accustomed to the process. 

Honestly, though, I really need to work on Asteroids.... It's what's cool here now...

We hit the 7th week by delving straight into backbone.js on Rails. It adds 4 more layers to the MVC architecture we're used to with Rails and it's a LOT of moving parts to keep track of. It was definitely a challenge to know where things work in Backbone.

The Journal that KC and I built turned out great though!

Check out the app at KC's tumblr. 

The best part about it is that it renders everything on one page, without the need for redirects. That's also another mindset that I had to get out of. Rails used to be the primary way we navigated a working site. Constant redirects. Now, Rails has been relegated to the backend, serving up JSON renders, while backbone is now the face of the app.

Another main confusion was what gets passed into what. It felt very reminiscent of how confusing JavaScript function passing was at first glance. 

This had to have been one of the hardest days in the curriculum. Particularly because AJAX requests didn't make much sense at first. We got a little more exposure behind these background requests and how they make the page much less "redirect-y".

A neat trick was to bind on input to the search bar to be able to get instantaneous searches each time a character was input. 

jQuery plugin day. Basically every ecommerce site uses at least a couple of the plugins we built today. Thumbnails, image carousels, tabs, and image zoom in, it's all been demystified.

That's probably the most interesting part. All of these features that up until now you sort of accepted as "just how it works", suddenly got broken down into a combination of jQuery, CSS, and HTML. 

Everything that we're doing is just so... AWSUM! It really goes to show how a well designed site has proper use of plugins and features. When you start off small, and create small features, even the tiniest things make you proud and excited. Now we hit the "tricks", the things that add that extra "WOW" factor, and it's just so amazing working through it step by step.

I'll just leave these here...

Why was this so much freaking fun?!

Today involved marrying jQuery with what we learned in CSS yesterday. We weren't required to implement the games themselves, as that would be overkill. We simply had to bridge the UI with the game logic using event handlers.

Sadly we didn't get to Snake.

It's been a couple days of working with JavaScript already and, sure, we're decently comfortable with the syntax now. We're jumping straight into jQuery, however, and it seems like a very specialized tool in connecting the DOM with the JS code. I guess the curriculum meant for this to happen. We learned how to implement using JS, then the UI (CSS), and bridged it today.

*there's a decent amount of errors in the above...*

I bet you thought this was an actual site. Nope, CSS.

I feel dirty creating exact copies. CSS is like having a master makeup guru for halloween. It can make you look like ANYTHING!!!!!

I mean, there's absolutely no functionality in the above website, but, it looks like it does right? IT'S ALL A LIEEEEE.

I deeply respect video game developers for the insane amount of features they have to consider when developing. Just implementing basic movement and behavior let alone implementing real life physics is insanely difficult.

After a misfortunate weekend, I tried my best to finish the readings and come prepared, but, I was definitely not prepared for Asteroids. 

Half of the fun in learning JavaScript lies in the process of debugging why the program doesn't work the way you want it to. The exercises are familiar enough that we completely understand the logic needed, we just don't know if the JS is implemented correctly.

The readline JS library isn't compatible with node in the terminal... But we didn't really know that. You get "drunk vision" whenever you try to utilize the command line after loading the library. We thought it was just something we had to deal with and tried to keep testing. 

We built our own bind method and an absurdBubbleSort to get into the habit of understanding callbacks + this. I feel like this pattern might come in handy in future projects. Having to keep track of 3-4 callbacks which are running asynchronously.