The Jadenator

This week, we began looking into computer science. We covered things like Regex, lots of testing, making rail helpers, charting, and using the Twitter API. 

Week 9 Tuesday! Melbourne Cup day today!

We started to look into unit testing using Rspec (I didn't enjoy doing the Code School classes on it. I thought I understood unit testing after Joel’s lesson, but the Code School exercises just got me super confused), CoffeeScript, and now window Local Storage, which saves information within the user’s browser, rather than having to depend on a backend database (really awesome!). I spent last night doing Euler Challenges in CofeeScript with Andrew. I managed to get up to exercise 11 using CoffeeScript, which I’m rather proud of! Hopefully I can finish up to 20 by the end of the week before the Burning Airlines exercise! On another note, I’m surprised by how complicated it is to sort an array of numbers in Javascript. In Ruby, sorting an array would only require this: array = [3, 2, 1] sortedArray = array.sort           # = [1, 2, 3] But in JavaScript, we need to do this to sort the array in order: var array = [3, 2, 1]; var sortedArray = array.sort( function(a, b) {      return a - b; }); Well I guess I will just have to remember this trick!  Today, we made a horse race sweepstake, inspired by the festivities happening in Melbourne, while exploring window.localStorage.

So Project 2 is finished! Over a week, Veronique (@sniquey) and I created an awesome running app called Super Mario Run. 

The idea of the app was for someone to run while pretending to be Mario, where every 10 m or so, there will be a coin for them to collect, or in every 100 m, there is a turtle which chases them to pick up their pace. 

In terms of design, we were focused on making it as 90s as we could - not unlike playing on your Playstation back in the day.  

We managed to get quite a bit done, but only over the core running app. I also managed to figure out how to incorporate movements in the accellerometer to track steps. I think I was super proud of figuring that out, considering there wasn't a library for me to use. 

Instead, I incorporated JavaScript, Ajax and Ruby to send absolute changes in the accelerometer data (from the average of ~10, when standing still), and figure out the absolute changes in the accelerometer data to count one step, and send that to the backend database.

So I haven't posted in a while. My bad. I'm going to try and post more frequently, but for the time being, I'll provide an update on the last 2 weeks.

We've gotten into Javascript! And ohmygod is it amazing! Although JS isn't as easy as Ruby, it has so much potential. We've learn JQuery (which Frank says is apparently not the 'cool library' anymore. The Internet has moved on… even though JQuery is still on 90%+ of the internet), Underscore library and Handlebars library. We've also covered AJAX, which I'm really interested in exploring a bit more. I really want to get good at AJAX, since I've always been really impressed with websites that allow me to submit forms and show things have been entered without needing to leave the page. Yay for single page applications! I'm not that familiar with JS yet, but I hope that I do get better at it soon especially after this weekend. Overall, the pace has picked up in the classroom and there's heaps for me to learn and do! I'm not sure if I want to be a front-end developer, but it's still been pretty fun.  So it's project week again! And we're making something fun (and I probably need to use since I'm really gaining some weight now from the last 7 weeks). Veronique and I are pairing up to make an app called Super Mario Run. Essentially, it's a running app which gamifies running. As you run, it does the usual stuff of tracking your route, your distance, your pace, and how many calories you've burned. But on the other side, we're making it like a real life Mario game, we're you're Mario!

As you run along, you get a coin every Xm, or get a mushroom where you can have a break stop. As you move up the levels (by accumulating more points), it's harder to get coins and mushroom break stops, and evil turtles come out which end up chasing you (so you have to pick up the pace or else you'll get caught and lose coins!). Also, you are committed to running X times per week, and if you miss out on a week, you will lose a life. On particularly good weeks, you will gain an extra life every now and then.  For the time being, we'll be using Facebook logins (maybe Google as well!), AWS image uploads, geolocators (including Google Maps AJAX, Google Maps JS, and other related gems). But I think there's heaps of potential to make it even more complicated and I'm excited to see what we can do. In the long term, I'm really interested in creating something with augmented reality. Andrew bought a Google Cardboard this week, and I'm super keen to try it out. 

So I’ve skipped about a week of posting - but I have good reason! Last week was project week, and we pretty much started on last Friday on Day 19 (everyone pitched their idea), and then finished up 7 days later on Friday Day 25. 

I built this website, Little Wheels, inspired by the RTA hackathon to let parents find a safe, reliably and punctual way to organise carsharing for their primary school-aged children. 

I’m actually really proud of it, on both a backend and UX experience basis. It’s actually kind of cool as our team was selected as a winner, and we’ll be incubated by RTA and Deloitte. Shame that I’m stepping out of the official team since there’s too many problems with team dynamics.

The part I’m most proud of is the section on Trips where a parent can add a child to a registered trip to that child’s school, and the map will update automatically.

Also, I really like the comment section on the trips page, where parents can leave messages and comments for each other. I was pretty worried about security (since this might be like a pedofile’s dream!), so users can only see the profiles, children, and trips that relate to schools which their own children go to as well.

If you want to test it without making an account, you can login with username ‘turkey’, password ‘turkey’. 

Next steps, I want to push in calendar integration, private messaging, ratings, point gamification, and school accounts to approve parents. Plus improving the code to make it better.

In conclusion, I really can’t believe that I made this. 

Just one month ago, I was struggling with writing a calculator program on my terminal. Now I’ve made this insane website which will hopefully improve the lives of millions of parents across Australia (and the world). Although I do know that this won’t be enough as there’s a lot more I need to do/improve before it gets launched, but as a demo and a test of what I’ve learnt, I’m super excited with it.

Now onto JavaScript!

So we had a pretty intense day today. We covered quite a bit in terms of linking and understanding how associations work, including has_and_belongs_to, through links for associations, HAML (like HTML, but less typing) and log-ins.

I also learnt that if a website has my password stored as a string, then you definitely should go and change your password because they should be using something like bcrypt to store a fake string! I didn't know all this about internet security!